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Ira Glass at about thirteen years old.

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today, just for kicks we're gonna start in a park. So let me set the scene.

JAD: Couple days ago, we gathered a bunch of Radiolab listeners in McCarren Park in Brooklyn.

ROBERT: This is a random set of listeners.

JAD: Random set of listeners. Whoever showed up as a result of a few tweets and Facebook postings. Got about 70 people. It was a super cold day. Park was covered in snow. And we had brought everybody there to help us make some noises that we would use in this segment. Like ...

JAD: Chanting. Or -- it was amazing. You'll hear them throughout the hour. But when people got there, we hadn't actually explained to them why we wanted them to make these noises. So just to start things off, I just asked them a couple questions.

JAD: Questions of the moment.

JAD: This was not a shocking revelation.

ROBERT: No. Kind of expected.

JAD: But these anti-football sentiments, I believe they say more about you and I and our fans than the game.

ROBERT: Although I -- in fairness, I mean there are a lot of people who -- I would even consider myself a -- a -- I watch for the ads.

JAD: Okay. Whether you watch for the ads like you or whether you love the game like I happen to, or loathe it like some others, football right now ...

ROBERT: It's massively popular. That's not the same as ...

JAD: I actually think it's massively interesting, also. Here's a way to think about it. Sally Jenkins, the author of the book The Real All-Americans, she puts it this way. Imagine a thousand years from now, maybe ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand years from now, we're all gone. All our history has been forgotten. All the silly trifling games we play have been lost to time. Imagine the future human beings looking back on us.

JAD: Okay, so here's the thing Radiolab listeners. We're gonna do an entire hour on the game of football. In part, because it just seems to be that there are a lot of questions in the air about football right now, about what it is and what that means about us. What it might or could or can't become.

ROBERT: Am I gonna like this?

JAD: Absolutely! This -- in a way, this whole hour is for the people like you who really don't care about football. And I am willing to wager that at the end they will care more. Particularly because of this first story which comes from Sally Jenkins who just heard. It comes from her book The Real All Americans This is a story, not about the game as you might think of it now, but about where it came from. It didn't come from the people you'd expect.

ROBERT: Okay, I'm folding my hands. And you see here, in my lap. I'm going to listen to this.

JAD: Okay, you want to get in the three-point stance?

ROBERT: 71! 71 Hike! We're ready to begin.

JAD: And this is a story about the beginning.

JAD: Basically she says, you had these kids whose parents had fought in the Civil War and then some of them had gone west to fight the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Apaches. And now those wars were winding down, which oddly enough created kind of an issue for young men at the time.

ROBERT: If you're a young student, say back east at a fancy school like Harvard, how are you gonna prove your own toughness? I mean, your older brother, your father they maybe fought at Gettysburg, Battle of Little Bighorn.

JAD: And so, according to historian David Adams who you just heard, those kids were desperate for opportunities to man up.

JAD: Around this time says David Adams, you see a bunch of violent sports take off. And in particular, for our purposes, you see these kids at Harvard and Yale getting together and knocking the snot out of each other in this game that's kind of like rugby, but just more violent.

JAD: Writer Chuck Klosterman, and before him historian. Dr. Conrad Crane.

JAD: There were formations and strategies and that kind of thing, but it was pure, like, right out of Napoleon's military playbook. I mean, where you -- you concentrate your force.

ROBERT: Yeah, my shoulder next to your shoulder next to his shoulder. It's like a line.

JAD: Yeah, you bunch up all -- all your men, and then pierce the other guy's army.

JAD: That was the basic idea.

ROBERT: And so you just end up with piles of guys.

JAD: Yeah, and inside those piles?

JAD: But then along comes this school, this tiny little school founded in 1879 in the middle of nowhere, that if you're a football fan or just a fan of American history kind of changed everything.

JAD: Big guy. Shock of white hair. Large nose.

JAD: And it was after winning a lot of those fights, too many of those fights really, we're talking 1870s now, that Pratt had a change of heart. And he -- he suddenly became concerned about the very people he had just been fighting.

JAD: His idea was to start a boarding school specifically for American Indian children that was kind of a radical experiment.

JAD: IE. they would be white-itized.

JAD: That's Barbara Landis.

JAD: We went up to Carlisle to talk with her and her colleague Kara Curtis. And they told us that Pratt basically made that pitch ...

JAD: ... not just to Congress, but directly to American Indian families all over the country.

JAD: We need to teach them how to communicate with the white man, so that when the white man comes and tries to get you to sign away the Black Hills you won't fall for it again.

JAD: Joe lives near the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He's Lakota. And he told us the story about his grandfather who was a famous Lakota chief. In the 1890s, his grandpa led a delegation of American Indians to Washington.

JAD: Joe says his grandpa had this moment where he was just stunned by how many white people there were. His phrase was, "They're like ants."

JAD: Basically, Joe says his grandpa just had this realization.

JAD: And it seemed to him Carlisle was the way forward.

JAD: As kids were admitted, here's how it would work. They would come in, and they'd immediately have their picture taken on arrival. Then they'd be given an extreme makeover which would also be photographed.

ROBERT: Barbara showed us a picture of a Navajo kid looking maybe 18 years old.

ROBERT: This is when he arrives. So he's got kind of dark skin, high cheekbones.

ROBERT: He's wearing an elaborate necklace. Looks like it might be made of bone.

JAD: And he's wrapped in a blanket.

JAD: In the second picture, his hair is very short. Not long.

JAD: He's wearing a three-piece suit.

JAD: Joe American Horse said his family saw that transformation firsthand.

JAD: But just think about this for a second. Just think about this. We spoke with one guy Professor Eric Anderson who teaches at Haskell, he's also part Pottawatomi. Just imagine the parents, he says, the first time they see their kids.

JAD: In any case, according to Sally Jenkins, after the kids were recropped and redressed, Pratt would run them through a bunch of drills.

JAD: I mean, we know that in the 39-year history of the school at least 200 kids died of disease or poor health or even homesickness.

JAD: And Sally thinks that one of those hires ...

JAD: This guy who had formerly taught at an Ivy League school. He showed the Carlisle Indian kids this game that the kids at Harvard were playing. Maybe he thought it would toughen them up, who knows? But suddenly they're playing football. Now keep in mind, this is, you know, at a point, we're talking 1882, where football's barely a thing. Not so many schools had teams.

JAD: But the Carlisle kids self-organized, level the field, start to play. They even start to scrimmage some kids across town. And at one of those games, according to Barbara ...

JAD: Because in his mind he was trying to civilize these kids, and football was doing the opposite. But a short time later, says David Adams ...

JAD: According to his memoir, Pratt was sort of bowled over by the eloquence and passion of the appeal. So he said, "Okay ..."

JAD: And at that early point in American football ...

JAD: Which brings us to October 24th 1896.

JAD: Apparently, there was about 4,000 people in the stands, including ...

JAD: According to David Adams in one paper ...

JAD: Because of course, that's what Pratt wanted. Now one thing that was immediately clear to everyone in attendance when they saw the Carlisle players was that they were physically outmatched.

JAD: Or at the very least, the odds are heavily against them. But three minutes into the game, in the midst of a big pile up. A Yaley fumbles the ball. It comes squirting out. Carlisle guy picks it up, and runs the entire length of the field, 63 yards, and scores the touchdown. Now, nobody had scored on Yale in seven games. They were furious. So what they do is they use their bulk to slowly push the pile down the field twice to take the lead. And with three minutes left, Yale is up 12 to 6, Carlisle has the ball. Carlisle running back charges the pile and gets clobbered. Falls backwards, And just as he's about to hit the earth, he laterals the ball to a teammate who grabs it, runs around the scrum the entire length of the field and scores!

ROBERT: And some of the Carlisle players said oh, we're gonna walk out of here. We are leaving this game. But according to David, at the last moment Pratt runs down from the stands comes onto the field and says, "Wait a second, wait a second. Wait. Don't forget rule number one. Be a gentleman."

ROBERT: So the Carlisle boys finish the game. And when they walk off the field ...

JAD: They get a standing ovation.

JAD: After another Carlisle-Yale game where something similar happened ...

JAD: The complicatedness of Pratt and of the whole Carlisle idea kept smacking us in the face as we were putting this show together. I mean on the one hand, there were clearly students who felt that Carlisle was prison. In fact, Barbara Landis, when she took us on a tour of the grounds of the former Carlisle Indian School, she said that kids would even set fire to the buildings.

JAD: On the other hand, when we started looking around for original archival recordings of some of the earliest Carlisle players, pretty much the only recording we could find ...

JAD: Was this oral history with a guy named ...

JAD: Albert Exendine. The interview was done in the early '70s when he was 88. He entered the school.

JAD: Can't really play you too much of this because the audio quality is really bad. But in the interview, Pratt comes up.

JAD: and Exendine talks about him with a great deal of affection and gratitude.

JAD: We call him the father of Indian education.

JAD: Now Pop Warner was an interesting guy.

JAD: Just to give you a visual.

JAD: Barbara and Karen showed us pictures. Looks kind of like Mike Ditka if Mike Ditka had Einstein's hair.

JAD: And that is exactly what he does in spectacular fashion when he gets to Carlisle.

JAD: Sure, they're fast, they got heart.

ROBERT: But Harvard did not take this lying down. Harvard retaliates by painting the footballs the same color as their jerseys. It's maroon everywhere. So when they held the ball against their chest, the ball basically, well, you can't see it.

JAD: At least initially, British football ran on the honor system. But with American football, the refs were there practically from the beginning. And she says it was largely a response to the brutality of the game, but also to the kind of rule-bending that you saw from Pop Warner and the Carlisle Indians.

JAD: And Pop Warner's greatest sleight of hand, and maybe the Carlisle Indians most soaring moment -- and I mean that literally, happened at a moment when the game almost disappeared. That's coming up.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And getting back to our story on the Carlisle Indian School and the birth of the modern game of football. One of the most important moments in this story happens at a time when football it was right on the edge of disappearing. Talking about 1905.

JAD: This was the most violent year in football to this point. 19 people died on the football field.

ROBERT: One death is a lot. But 19? That's crazy.

JAD: Yeah. Because what would happen is that Carlisle would try and do these things to sort of open up the game. The Ivys would consistently respond by making the game more about brute force, more about violence. And so you had all these deaths. And suddenly all the major programs were spooked. You know, Columbia pulls their -- their football team. Harvard even thinks about doing that.

ROBERT: And so, and this is kind of odd. Into the fray steps the President of the United States of America, Teddy Roosevelt. Because he was a fan, according to Conrad Crane.

ROBERT: And then there was his kid.

JAD: Broke his nose, slit his eyebrow.

ROBERT: In one game he got knocked out cold. So after the violence of '05, the President calls the presidents of all these colleges and so on to Washington. And according to David Adams, he basically tells them ...

JAD: And out of that we see a couple of rule changes. First, the schools decide in order to loosen up the pile so to speak, they're gonna tinker with the down yardage ratio.

ROBERT: Three downs to get ten yards or four downs to get ten yards?

JAD: Four would come a couple years later.

JAD: But the second rule change, which is maybe the most important for our story, is for the first time they legalized the ability to move the ball through the free-floating air that surrounds us all. Okay.

ROBERT: So where do we go -- what's the next ...?

JAD: So if I could -- if I could place you in a moment, unless there's a moment before this you'd like to hit. I believe November 23rd, 1907.

JAD: But not so fast with football, because when the rule committee had made that rule about forward passing they had also hedged a little bit saying if you throw a forward pass and your receiver doesn't catch it you are penalized 15 yards, which back in the day was a monster amount. So nobody threw the ball. It was too risky.

ROBERT: But, story goes as soon as that rule got passed, Pop Warner goes back to his garage. It's always a garage of course, with a ball. And he starts experimenting. And he started thinking okay, what would be the most efficient way to toss this thing?

JAD: Sort of imagine a deflated basketball.

JAD: And in 1906, there's a tiny bit of tape in Albert Exendine's oral history where he talks about this. In 1906, he says Pop called all the players together. He tells them ...

JAD: He says, "I think you're gonna have to learn to spiral the ball."

JAD: Because if you throw the ball on the spiral it gets 10 times less air drag than if you throw it end-over-end.

ROBERT: Plus it's easier to catch.

JAD: Which gets us to that game. November 23rd, 1907, Carlisle plays the University of Chicago. Last game of the season. We're in Chicago. And the Chicago team is arguably the best in the nation.

ROBERT: The best. I don't think it's even arguable.

JAD: Well, Carlisle's good at this point, though.

ROBERT: Yeah. But Chicago's like Stagg Field, whoa!

JAD: And there are 27,000 people in the stands.

JAD: And so Carlisle's greatest receiver, Albert Exendine, our guy, had been stymied the entire game, because the minute the ball was snapped the Chicago players would ...

JAD: By some accounts, this was Exendine's idea. But whoever thought of it, on the next play Albert Exendine as expected ends up out of bounds, but he keeps running.

JAD: Runs around the spectators, maybe around the band.

JAD: Right at that moment ...

JAD: Lets loose a vicious spiral.

JAD: This is Sally's description of that moment from her book The Real All Americans.

JAD: After we'd spent an entire day looking at pictures of, you know, Albert Exendine and Pratt and Pop Warner and Delos Lone Wolf and Tom Torlino and all these Carlisle players, Barbara and Kara took us to the field where they practiced.

JAD: And we just kind of walked around and tried to imagine all the stuff we'd just seen in photos.

ROBERT: It was a little bit like walking among ghosts.

JAD: Yeah. That's the sound of the flag blowing in the background. I remember standing on that field and having this thought that I couldn't quite articulate. But later, Eric Anderson, that professor from Haskell, who's a member of the Pottawatomi Nation, he sort of put his finger on it. And essentially said that, like, there's a lot of room on a football field. I mean, there's room for anger and war and violence, but there's also room for pride and a kind of coming together, that's not a Pratt coming together where one side gets erased, but it is a coming together.

JAD: A lot of people to thank for this episode. We had original music made for us for that episode from Morgan O'Kane. You can hear him right here playing the banjo. That's MorganOKaneMusic.com. Check him out. Also, we had original music from Austin musician Shaky Graves. And the Albert Exendine tape that we played is from the research division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

ROBERT: Thanks also to the Cumberland County Historical Society and the US Army Heritage and Education Center, where you can go and see tons of photos from both archives, or you can come to us.

JAD: On our website, Radiolab.org, we have a ton of old archival football picks, a ton of those before-and-after pictures from the ...

JAD: Really amazing. And we also have a link to Sally Jenkins's book, which is highly recommended. The Real All Americans. That's on our site Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Thanks also to Reggie Kathy and to Scott Graham. To Noah Robbins to Michael Chernus to Matt Della Pina, Cole Wimpy, to J.R. McCarthy to Nick Capodice.

JAD: Colin and Michelle Campbell.

JAD: And special thanks, very special thanks to our amazing volunteer cheer squad that came out and weathered the Brooklyn cold to scream and holler and bring this story to life. And speaking of that, very special thanks to Brenna Farrell who found the story and produced it with us. And production support from Damiano Marchetti.

ROBERT: Well, that's a lot of people to have thanked. But we will have -- we will have more to listen to and more people to thank in the second half of our program.

JAD: Yeah, we're gonna take a distinctly modern view on football coming up.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Still talking about football.

ROBERT: This is the second half.

JAD: And you know, in the first half we talked about where football came from. Now we want to look at where it's going. Which seems to be the big conversation these days. And as we were thinking about that, we ended up talking with one of our favorite sports writers, Chuck Klosterman.

ROBERT: You may know him from his Ethicist column in the New York Times. He also writes about sports for Grantland. And he recently wrote an essay about football and its inherent contradictions. And it recalled for us this sort of Carlisle versus Ivy freeflow versus traditional sort of thing, but in a newer sort of modern way.

JAD: Chuck says if you look at all the new formations that keep getting added and all the trick plays that are tried out every year, it is quite clear that football as a game ...

JAD: Those old Ivy fundamentals of power and might and tradition.

JAD: And Chuck's whole argument is that it is football's unique ability to be both at the same time: reactionary and simultaneously wildly inventive, so that you can think about it one way and feel about it another, that is what makes football ...

JAD: What he means is that the NFL's three times as popular as the next most popular sport in America. And the question we got to, just because it's a question you can't really avoid right now is, is it gonna stay that way?

JAD: Two separate streams in our collective unconscious.

JAD: Okay, so we got to be honest. Like, when Chuck was talking about the -- his whole idea of silos shooting skyward, cool idea, but we weren't really sure what that meant exactly.

JAD: That is until our producer Soren Wheeler met this woman.

SOREN: So Monet is a partner at a media production company. She lives with her husband and their four kids outside of Atlanta, Georgia. But I actually went to talk to her about her son Parker, because Monet says the very moment he was born ...

SOREN: Her dad is Mel Farr. He was a running back for the Detroit Lions, and actually Rookie of the Year in 1967.

SOREN: Her brothers Mel Farr Junior and Michael Farr both played football.

SOREN: And then another and another. And for a time, the Mel Farr Auto Group was actually the largest African American-owned business in the country.

SOREN: And then the season starts.

SOREN: Monet says she knew that, but when Parker's team would take the field ...

SOREN: The crazy part is that as all this is happening, as Parker's taking the field with his four- and five-year-old teammates ...

SOREN: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

SOREN: Symptoms include memory loss, sometimes bouts of anger. In this case ...

SOREN: And while Parker was playing, the part of her that did see what happens on the flipside, that -- that part would campaign to raise awareness of CTE with other parents.

SOREN: And her current solution to this quandary ...

SOREN: And at about this point in the conversation, Parker came home from school.

SOREN: I'm not exactly sure how an eight-year-old should look, but he's a pretty big kid.

JAD: Thanks to Monet and Parker Bartell for letting -- letting Soren invade their home and exhaust them on short notice. And by the way, when Monet went back and counted all the relatives that had been in the NFL, it wasn't 33 it was 13. But that's still -- that's a lot. In any case, here's a logical question that we felt like we should ask at least somewhere in this show. Given Tank's experience, you know, where football was practically his birthright, but he is opting out. Are there a lot of Tanks out there? Like, is football the sport tanking nationally? Generally? We asked Molly Webster to find out.

MOLLY WEBSTER: It's funny. One of -- one of my friends, we call him Tank, but that's because he can drink a lot. And my dad can't remember his name. He just goes, "How's Tank? How's that Tank fellow?" "Still drinking a lot." In any case, I started making some calls to high school coaches.

MOLLY: Winning teams, losing teams.

MOLLY: And to kind of get a handle on the bigger picture, I called this guy.

MOLLY: Okay. So in 2013, he was an intern at the Wall Street Journal's sports desk.

MOLLY: By the way, Pop Warner is no longer the person Pop Warner, but he is a youth football league.

MOLLY: When people saw these numbers they were like, "Oh, my God!"

JAD: Why, exactly? Five percent doesn't sound too bad.

MOLLY: Well I mean, if you assume that the five percent drop doesn't change, that's what it drops by every year, then in 15 years you're in the neighborhood of, like, 50 percent less kids playing ball.

MOLLY: The idea is you -- if you don't have the kids getting trained in, like, Pop Warner, then they're not going to middle school football. They're not going to high school football and they're not going to college football. So they're not going to the NFL.

MOLLY: Needless to say, everyone was like, "Oh, my God. Is this actually true? Or is there more to these numbers than meets the eye?" So Ryan starts digging into them.

MOLLY: And he doesn't look just at Pop Warner numbers, he looks at all the youth football leagues.

MOLLY: Your relief will be short-lived, because -- because there's a bigger story. When Ryan looked at participation across all youth sports, not just football ...

JAD: Is this an extension of the whole concussion thing?

MOLLY: Yes. Concussions were definitely part of the conversation. But so were, you know, budget issues, and kids specializing in sports and getting burnt out. Basically, everyone had their reasons and every school has their reasons, but the guys I talked to ...

MOLLY: They just kept coming back to land on this point that had nothing to do with safety.

MOLLY: That's J.T. Curtis, J.J. Woodward and George Salas. They're in Louisiana, California and Kansas. And I heard this refrain not just from them, but I heard this in Ohio, I heard this in Michigan. And by this point I was like, Jesus!

MOLLY: It's funny, because it's as if all the coaches all across the nation are reading the same book or going to the same bar or something, because literally everyone I've talked to has brought this up. Is it just that everyone's said it to each other so much that ...

MOLLY: So all these coaches I talked to were like, "You can't go hit reset. You can't hit reset. You can't hit reset." Like, these kids are used to, like -- I sound so old. They're basically saying that what they find is they feel like there's some -- some commitment issue now.

ROBERT: I only play if I win. I only want to win.

MOLLY: Yeah. So the interesting thing was is the coaches I talked to at the power house schools were like, "Well, we're not actually having trouble getting kids because we win." But the other schools in their conference, they know that coaches and athletic directors, and then I talked to some schools that had forfeiting teams, that ended up forfeiting games. They said like, "You just don't get the kids that will work their asses off and ride the bench."

ROBERT: Well, everybody wants to win. It just somehow sounds like they expect to win or it isn't worth the effort?

MOLLY: Or it's just that there are so many options, like, why would you choose the losing option?

JAD: All right. So whether it you think it's video games, or parenting, or fear of concussions, or whatever reason you want to choose, it seems to be the larger thing that happens in these conversations about sports like football, is it doesn't actually seem to be about football. It's like some kind of negotiation between the generations. Because, like, back in the 1870s, the Harvard kids they were using football as a way to say back to the previous generation like, "Look how tough we are. Look how manly we are." Maybe this generation is turning away from sports like football also to say something back to the previous generation. Something about the world they want to live in.

JAD: I mean, overt masculinity of any kind, it's not something that we're in the mood to celebrate these days. So it could be, if you believe writer Chuck Klosterman, it could be that some kids are choosing away from sports like football because to play football, it means that on some level you have to support or at least entertain ideas that you don't like, you know? Or at least you don't want to admit that you like. Except he admits it.

JAD: Okay, we're back. One last thing, one last thing. Okay, if you grew up on Inside The NFL as I did, this is for you. It's The Voice.

JAD: That was Mr. Scott Graham, voice of Inside The NFL. Thank you, Scott. You are the awesomest voice ever. And that was original music by Dylan Keefe. Bye!
-30-

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Football | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
RADIOLAB INTRO] ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. JAD: And today, just for kicks we're gonna start in a park. So let me set the scene. JAD: Couple days ago, we gathered a bunch of Radiolab listeners in McCarren Park in Brooklyn. ROBERT: This is a random set of listeners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC.

Before we get started I had a couple of questions for you.

Yeah, please. Fire away.

I've talked to a lot of people who you've attempted to contact. There's a lot of hesitation. People just don't have faith in media right now, and considering our issues, to be honest, white-controlled media.

So I got a couple of questions for you.

Why do we want to do this story now?

Yeah. It's been a couple of years.

Well, Abby just found the story. It was unknown to us until right now.

This feels a little newsy-of-the-moment in its upside-down way.

This is Robert, by the way, our other host.

So we have Robert, we have...

We have Robert, we have Jad...

And we have Abigail.

Did you have other questions?

Sure. We can wait. We can table those.

No, ask them. Ask them.

Let's hear them.

So what is the end goal? What do you want the story to say?

We never that at the beginning.

Okay, hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is Radiolab and today...

Today we're going to tell you the story of a guy: a guy named Ryan Wash.

He's part of a movement of people who have taken this established corner of the academic world and they've reshaped it and reframed it.

Into something even weirder and more different.

Weirder. Huh.

No, not weird bad. Weird interesting. Interesting. Let's replace the word weird with interesting.

I don't know, I'll confess I find it...

I'm just saying in debate lingo, that's a link.

That's a link?

Usually, when you run a criticism the link is the thing that they've done bad.

The description of performance debate is problematic.

Can I put a less...

Less judgmentally?

Okay, so the world that we're talking about, which is at the center of this whole story, is debate.

High school debate and college debate. Now, I never did debate, but from the outside it always seemed like this hyper-competitive brain sport.

These guys with these accordion briefcases where they have all these files in there with all the research.

Yeah. They go to these tournaments and they argue about some topic back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

Now, the interesting about debate... I didn't know this beforehand... is that the people who people who do this often go on to become hugely powerful people: Supreme Court judges, presidents, leading thinkers, scholars, titans of industry.

It's the farm team of the big folks for tomorrow. So Lee Iacocca from Chrysler, he was a debater.

Margaret Thatcher, Ted Cruz, Carl Rove, Hillary Clinton.

Oprah Winfrey.

Richard Nixon.

They all were debaters.

Today, this is Ryan Wash's story of debate.

Actually, it's Ryan's story debating debate.

Yes. This story comes from reporter Abigail Keel. Before we get going, I just want to let you know there is some language in this story: some profane words. Skip it if you need to. Otherwise, here we go.

Is it cool if we jump in, Ryan?

I would love to know, Ryan, what was your life like before you were ever on a debate team?

Well, Kansas City, Missouri, inner city public school. 99% black students. I was actually tricked into debating.

Really? When was this that you're talking about?

Let me see. 2000... I'm sorry, I'm old. 2005?

When were you born if you're saying you're old?

But yeah. I ended up getting tricked into debate. I'm definitely more of an observant person, which is why I like to play the game of chess, because how people move their pieces... the time it takes them to move their pieces... all gives away something. There are tells.

So I was tricked into debate by playing chess, and I ended up winning the school chess tournament that we had. This little short German redhead lady named Jane Reinhardt came to chess practice... I ended up being president of the chess club... one day and pulled me in the hallway and was like...

I understand you were chess champion and that's a really good thing. We have this debate program and I think you'd be really good at it.

Like, "Anybody who could critically think at chess could critically think at debate." Yadda yadda yadda. I didn't even know what debate was.

So he told her...

"No. Not for me." But I persist.

So over the next year...

She kept on telling me, "I thought I told you to join debate." I was like, "I thought I told you no."

I can spot a debater at 20 paces.

She was just like, "Okay, you think I'm playing." One Monday I came to school. She handed me a piece of paper. It was a revised scheduled. She had my scheduled to where I had debate first hour.

I just [inaudible 00:06:14].

Here you are. That's what's happens with a lot of my debaters. They just come in kind of dazed. Like, "Uh, my schedule got changed." I'm like, "Yeah, okay, that's fine. Take a seat."

Those first few classes, Ryan is learning the basics of debate, and this kind of debate that he's doing is called policy debate. There's two teams and two people on each team. Usually the debate is about some kind of national policy topic, like, "The United States government should increase its economic engagement in China." One team, at the beginning of the debate, is randomly assigned to be affirmative. That means they're supporting that proposition. They're saying, "Yes, the United States' federal government should do that. Here's why." The other team is the negative team, and they're doing against the affirmative.

Both of those sides make their case and then at the end the judge decides who made the better arguments.

I mean, I get them up debating almost day one.

We ended up having mock-debates in class, like Pepsi versus Coke, Family Guy versus the Simpsons, stuff like that. It was very fun. It made us learn how to do impact analysis.

Impact analysis?

What is that?

For instance...

Let's say you're debating apples versus oranges.

If I say the rinds of apples are necessary for the fertilizer to produce oranges, so you must vote for apples.

That would be the impact of choosing apples over oranges.

You have to be able to compare the two and make argumentation. The traditional standard for argumentation...

And as Ryan started learning all of this.

Impact analysis...

Toulmin's model...

Argumentation...

He started to...

Ethos, pathos, logos...

Do really well.

Yeah. Yeah he did.

Joined the team. Started going to tournaments.

Debate is one of those activities that affords you the possibility of traveling places. Where I grew up and went to school, students didn't leave a 40 block radius for their entire life.

You're in control in that debate round and everybody is listening to you. I think it's important to feel that way, even if it's only in a 60, 90 minute debate round.

Ryan needed those wins. He needed...

I was enjoying debate.

That affirmation.

I was having a great time.

The thing that helped me out was that my first tournament was a Debate Kansas City tournament. Debate Kansas City is an urban debate league. So we were debating other kids from the same neighborhood, just went to different schools. That environment of debate was, to me, very different. Like yeah, we wanted to win, but there was a lot more camaraderie in the debate, I thought.

By the time I went to my first national competition, I was very much committed to debate. But once I went to that national tournament for the first time, I was like, "Okay, I don't know about this."

At national tournaments, you're up against what I call name brand schools.

You know, like predominately private schools.

We were real excited about that. Put our little dress clothes on. Got cute.

Got on the bus.

Nerves started kicking a little bit just about going to a debate tournament. Got off the bus, went inside, and then we went into the cafeteria. When we opened the door to walk into the cafeteria and began to walk in the room went silent. I mean, when I tell you the talking stopped, literally 300 other plus students stopped and stared at us because a bus of black kids had just arrived. They watched us the whole time that we were in the cafeteria. They was like, "What are they doing here?" At least, that's how I felt.

We walked over to our table and our coach was like, "Do not worry about them. Pull out your things. Get warmed up. Get ready for competition." So got our stuff pulled out and started to practice, and then they started to whisper. Whether they were whispering about debate stuff or about us, I don't know. I wasn't in their heads. But I can definitely explain to you what that felt like. It was real awkward and it was real uncomfortable.

And making things even more awkward and more uncomfortable is that when the debates actually got going... and this is particularly true at the national level... this is what debate sounds like.

This event also turns back [inaudible 00:10:54] kids are sitting [inaudible 00:10:54] global nuclear war and esclation if there's a backlash [inaudible 00:10:54].

The plan: US federal government through an act of Congress will substantially reform domestic transportation infrastructure by requiring that all federally founded road paving projects in the US use 15 to 22% ground rubber and asphalt and concrete mixes.

One, [inaudible 00:11:02] moving targets, seven slots of [crosstalk 00:11:04].

What is this? Is this sped up or something?

No. This is what debate sounds like today. They kind of speed read.

The goal of speed reading, or spreading, if you will, is to get more arguments.

The US highway and road infrastructure has an urgent requirement for [crosstalk 00:11:19].

Hetero supremacy and white supremacy [inaudible 00:11:19].

And apparently... and this is a quick digression... this kind of thing actually started in the 1960s and the students were actually the ones who were driving it.

One of the things that makes debate such an interesting intellectual game is that it's much more of a bottom-up-driven activity than a top-down activity.

That's Scott Harris, director of debate at the University of Kansas. In the case of speed reading...

We developed a situation where one team decided, "I'm going to present eight arguments," and the other team talked slower and only answered six of them, and the judge says, "Well, you didn't answer two of these arguments so you lost the debate because you didn't answer those arguments." So the other team said, "We need to answer all eight of those arguments," and they started to talk faster. And the other team said, "Well, we'll present 10 arguments," and then they answered 12. It escalated to a point that, in some instances, has gone way too far.

Getting back to Ryan: it's not as if he didn't know how to do that style of debate.

That's the way I debated. I did try to speak fast.

But he says somewhere around the first national tournament, all that stuff stopped making sense to him, like the fast talking and the fact that he had to debate these super highfalutin topics.

I felt as if I could never take any of the stuff that I learned in debate and take it back to 304 [Aski 00:12:40], which is where I lived.

This isn't just unique to Ryan. What you see at this stage in debate is that a lot of kids, especially inner city kids from public schools, black students, they just start to drop out of debate at a certain point. But Ryan didn't do that.

Now something big is going to happen. I have a feeling. Somebody's going to say...

No. What happened was that a student from University Academy... she was a senior...

Her name was [Marshana 00:13:07] and she went to a different school than Ryan.

She came over and asked Reinhardt. She needed a partner. There was about to be this tournament called KCKCC TLC Tournament.

It was a big high school debate tournament. Marshana, she was a senior, so she was older than Ryan, but she needed a partner. She came to Jane Reinhardt and Jane said, "Well, here, Ryan. He's your guy."

So I met with Marshana. It was the Thursday before the tournament happened. And I pulled her into this room and I had three boxes of evidence and I was ready to go with my traditional stuff.

The topic was whether the US should increase participation in national service programs, so like Peace Corp, Armed Services, stuff like that.

I'm like, "This is the stuff that I've been working on." I showed her the Learn and Serve America stuff. I had this Peace Corp affirmative that I hadn't wrote yet.

He showed her note cards with statistics on them, quotes from various experts.

And she was like, "Mm-hmm (affirmative). Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah, that's cute." So she handed me this expando was just like...

"Take this folder, go home, study it."

So I go home and I open this expando and it was full of things. I stayed up literally all night studying this file. I mean, it was not a lot of evidence. There was not a lot of pre-written out answers to arguments. There wasn't a lot. There was Ralph Ellison's...

I am an invisible man.

There was a clip from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in there. There was...

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines.

A Maya Angelou poem in there.

You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I rise.

There was some original stuff that she wrote. And I didn't get it. But she was the senior, and Reinhardt kind of told me, "Let her drive the ship, you just ride along." I was like, okay.

We get to the first debate. I still was very unclear when we arrived at the tournament just what was going on.

He and Marshana get to the classroom and standing on the other side of the room are their two opponents.

Are they white kids mostly?

Yeah. They were white guys in suits with Republican ties on, if you want a vivid description.

The other team, they're affirmative, so they go first.

And they're like, [inaudible 00:15:23].

They lay out this whole argument about how the national service programs are good because they increase US power abroad. Then it was Marshana's turn.

So she gets up to give this speech and it starts with this like four minute long piece of spoken word.

It's like this performative speech, kind of, about her personal experience in debate.

And she had this way of speaking that was very passionately forceful. It made people stop. They stopped writing. They stopped talking.

And in the middle of this riff, Marshana laid out this argument...

That the style of debate that they engaged in, that fast paced form of debate, was exclusionary because it demotivated minority students from participating.

Not only, that it also creates this resource imbalance, because if you're going to start debating with a ton of arguments then you have to research that many arguments and you need help researching those arguments, so you pay people and you pay coaches to help you may those arguments, and that clearly favors rich and affluent schools. And beyond that, Marshana argued, even the language itself sets up a norm of what counts as intelligent, authoritative argumentation.

For instance, like men's voice to be held up over women, black people to always seem angry and rude when they're just being passionate, as if they don't have feelings. It was a criticism of the auctioneer style of debate. It was a criticism of the insular lingo of debate. It was a criticism of the way in which debates were decided socially and politically as opposed to argumentatively.

I was like, "Okay, I kind of get what she's [crosstalk 00:17:05]."

Were you shocked? Did this shock you?

No. I wasn't shocked. On the one hand, I was like, "That was great. That was tight." Snaps, like we was at the poetry slam. But I was sitting to myself, thinking, "Okay, how am I going to extend this?"

When it got to be his turn, what's left for him to say?

I don't know what other words I could use.

It wasn't until the second person from this team got up and he started to speak and he was like debating about "The state is great! This is disrespectful to the state of debate." And he turned to her... it was this moment... and he said it like from his soul: "You should go down the hall, because that's where poetry/prose is held. This is academic debate."

I was like, "What?" Basically, his argument was that what we were doing was not debating. What we were having was a talent show, is how he described it. And I was just like, "I get it." And maybe it was the studying I had done all night, but everything kicked in in that moment. My passion came into the room and I was just like...

What was it? You get it?

Like, I get everything that she was trying to say... what she was saying about the structure of debate, because I had felt those things before. I just didn't know how to articulate them.

Was it like permission?

I get what she's saying. Debate is fucked up. I'm sorry.

No, you're fine.

Let's just say we definitely went on to win that debate.

You won this match?

Yeah, we won the debate because...

Let me just explain what happened in this debate. Judges, in this kind of situation, have a choice: they can hear the arguments that Ryan and Marshana are making and they can think, "Okay, this isn't really about the Peace Corp or about Armed Services, so you lose," or they can do what the judge in this debate did and they can say, "All right, the topic has shifted, but let's look at what we have in front of us. Let's look at the arguments that were made." You have Ryan and Marshana saying that the structure of debate is racist and then you've got the other team not really responding in any kind of counter-argumentative way.

Ryan, in this debate, points at that. He points at when this other team says, "Leave the room," and he says, "Hey, what they just did proves our point: that we are excluded from debate." And the judge agreed.

Oh, so you used his "You don't belong here" as an argument against him.

That's what I was saying about our evidence. It came a lot from what happened in the debate itself.

That is fascinating.

But wait a second, wait a second. Let me just take that guy's side. You're throwing huge bombs at them: racism, hegemony. What's he supposed to do? Say, "I'm a racist?" What is he supposed to do?

What do you mean stop?

First off, he should stop. Second off, you don't have to say you're racist. Ain't nobody going to want to admit that they're racist. But you can definitely admit that you've engaged in racist practices or you can have a debate about whether or not that was a racist practice. There's a healthy debate to be had about that. But instead, what he said was that "You all do not belong here."

"Leave the room." If you walk in and you say what you just said and you say it forcibly and eloquently... I mean, the other side says, "Hey, you're changing the rules here. You're breaking things down. Leave the room." And then in the "Leave the room" they leave themselves open to this counter-attack that you give. It still surprises me that you'd win.

This is the thing. There's very few rules to debate, but there's tons of norms, and depending on the community of debate... the space of debate that you're in... those norms may differ. I only know of a few rules, like there must be a winner and a loser, time limits... and I've seen that be debatable at times... there must be an affirmative and a negative. Other than that, how one approaches debate, how one approaches the topic, how one approaches themselves and their opposition, all of that stuff is debatable and arguably should be debatable.

There's no, like, Bible of debate? There's no book of...

No. They put out things like the NDT Rule Book, which is like affirmative teams must be topical, but in the world of debate what does it mean to be topical? What does it mean to be on topic? That has to be debatable in order for a debate to [inaudible 00:21:48].

This is getting very interesting.

I'm just curious, if you're really good at this, can you parse me what you would've said if you were the guy coming after you or before you?

One of the things that they needed to do in particular was to say that the debate itself shouldn't be about debate. They were trying to say that, but they said was, "Y'all should leave."

That's interesting, because the place where I have sympathy for the other side is where they're like, "I thought we were talking about the Peace Corp." Like they walked into the wrong room or something.

But on the other hand...

But that was part of our argument, was that how do you do debate, how do you participate in an activity for hours and hours and hours... weeks upon weeks upon weeks, and arguable years on years on years... and not every think about why you debate the way that you do. That's what we were pressing.

What was the other team's reaction?

They were really upset. They called us a n-word and shit like that.

Yes. Like, what do you mean no? Yes!

We'll be right back.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is Radiolab.

And it's back to our story, again from producer Abigail Keel.

Which is a story about a guy named Ryan Wash and about debate. How we debate.

Just to pull back from that moment with Marshana and the poetry and all that, this kind of thing wasn't just happening in a vacuum. It actually came from all kinds of different places all at once.

One particular interesting person who was influencing it was George Soros.

The billionaire?

Soros was fascinated by debate.

That's Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley. She's a scholar and a big figure in the so-called black debate world.

Soros thought that debate was one of those kinds of activities that was incredibly important to the production of democracy.

So he started funding debate programs overseas...

In places like eastern Europe.

And here in the US he poured tons of money...

Like millions and millions and millions of dollars to start urban debate programs. First started with New York City.

They literally went out to all these New York high schools, talked to a bunch of administrators, and Soros just pumped money into New York City to start an urban debate league.

Then it went to Baltimore, then to Chicago, Detroit. It went to Kansas City, out to LA, Newark.

And it just kept moving. We're almost up to maybe 23 or 24 cities.

If you take a step back and look at it all, suddenly within a few years you have all of these new black debaters, and many of those students, she says, would go through the exact same thing that Ryan went through.

At the regional level, you can imagine you get a bunch of African American students, a bunch of teachers who are supporting them in a very positive environment. They build relationships and friendships. So debate feels like home in that space.

But as soon as they go to that first national tournament...

Culture shock, because there is a sea of white people.

And according to Dr. Reid-Brinkley, this influx of black debaters into a primarily white space started to create some tension and pressure. That all built up and eventually resulted in something called the Louisville Project.

The Louisville Project started. Its goal was to increase meaningful participation of [crosstalk 00:27:55].

[crosstalk 00:27:55].

[crosstalk 00:27:55] happened in Louisville.

Let's go back.

I know that there's a baseball bat associated with Louisville.

Jesus Christ.

So, early 2000s...

Down at the University of Louisville, there was a debate team.

A predominately African American team. They were having a hard time finding traction.

He says they would go to these national tournaments...

And no matter what they did, if they tried to accommodate the more traditional style, there was always something that they did wrong.

Apparently those students would try to make arguments about race inside the topics, but usually it didn't work.

At a certain point...

They decided that they were done with that.

They were like, "No, we are unwilling to play your game in the way that you have defined it should be played."

So these debaters, what they would basically do is they would show up and they would force a conversation about race, basically saying, "We're not going to talk about China or global trade until we deal with this."

This is Louisville's famous phrase. They said, "We can't change the state, but we can change the state of debate."

They end up developing this whole new methodology, which is actually a throwback to Aristotle. In his idea, you need three things to persuade someone: ethos, pathos, and logos. Logos is like logic, so getting research and scholars and evidence and things like that. Pathos, that's where emotion comes in, so maybe a personal story or sharing something that will connect with the audience. And then ethos, which is kind of hard to pin down. You can think of it as like credibility or speaking in tune with the spirit of your culture.

That's where you get the introduction of the use of hip hop.

Performers:

Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker complexion, the deeper the roots.

The use of spoken word.

Performers:

They say the niggers always already queer. That's exactly the point. It means that it is a case turned to the affirmative because we're saying that [crosstalk 00:29:58].

The use of what we call street scholars.

Performers:

Hands up, don't shoot. Hands up, don't shoot.

What was the reaction when this first started?

They would say things to Louisville like, "This isn't research, this is me-search," as if noted black scholars in their fields are not real experts, right? They would say things like, "Hip hop does not belong here. Your argument style doesn't belong here." I'm saying these things in really nice ways, but there could be really angry screaming matches at tournaments.

Would you have an objection to a prohibition... As a coach, if you said, "Look, for next year, let's never talk about you and leave your gender, your sex, your background, your family, your religion behind and stay entirely in the brain." I doubt that you would do that, but I'm wondering why you wouldn't.

I think that's anti-black. I think it's anti-black to...

Well, it's anti-everything. It would be anti-gay, anti-Jew, anti-everything.

Exactly. It would be anti all of those things. But particularly, for our purposes, it would anti-black. The reason that's important for me is because these students don't get to leave their blackness at the door when they enter for competition, right? They can pretend that they're not black, but that does not mean that everybody else is going to pretend that they are not black. Even when they speak, what arguments they make... When they open their mouths to make an argument, people are paying attention to the fact that it is coming out of a black body. They don't get to speak without race being a factor. Nobody gets to speak without race being a factor in a nation where race is a factor.

Now back to Ryan. He's 16 years old and he sees Marshana do this spoken word poetry thing. Starts to read more about Louisville and he's like, "I'm in."

I dedicated my debate career to discussing debate. Every debate. Every single one.

Every debate.

Every single one.

Fast forward. He graduates high school. Isn't sure he's going to go to college.

I was a first generation college student, so I really didn't know much about the process.

But then, early August 2008, he gets a message from a debate coach at a small in Kansas called Emporia State University.

And August 14 I was driving up to Emporia for college.

So Ryan gets there, gets paired up with a sophomore: Latoya Williams-Green.

Who's now the director of debate at Cal State [inaudible 00:32:22] best friend.

The two of them start debating together and over the course of a couple years, Ryan starts to get recognized.

He's winning speaker awards. He's making it into the outer rounds at tournaments. But it was an uphill battle.

She says that Ryan kept bumping into judges who weren't really into the whole three-tier approach to debate.

Yes. I lost a lot of debates before I won any of them.

And at this point, Latoya has graduated and he's debating a freshman on the team. He's halfway into senior year when his new debate partner flunked out of school.

At this point, it was either find somebody to debate with or my debate career was over.

What happens is Ryan is also close to one of my best friends who's one of my contemporaries, [Reshad 00:33:12] Evans, who was then a coach at Western Connecticut University. Basically, Reshad had this bombshell idea.

One day, they called Ryan up, and they were like, "What if you partnered up with this guy from Rutgers: Elijah Smith?"

The reason why particularly Reshad thought this was a good idea: first, Elijah was an astoundingly good debater. He just had excellent skills and traditional skills. But the other reason was that both Ryan and Elijah were queer black men.

The thinking was that you've got two guys standing at the intersection of two marginalized groups, and if they're going to try to make an argument about feeling excluded and invisible, well, they can own that argument better than almost anyone.

So I called him one night. It was 9:30 PM.

And he was like, "Hey, do you want to come debate with me?"

And he was like, "Dude, this is a lot. I can't really answer this right now." I was like, "I understand. I'm asking you to come move to Kansas for a semester, or what have you, and live..."

From Newark.

From Newark, New Jersey.

He called me back the next morning. It was like 8:00 AM my time. He was like, "I've already applied and everything." The next couple weeks he was down in Emporia. Elijah and I debated four tournaments together.

First tournament they won two matches, lost four.

I was very upset. I was heartbroken because I was senior and I was like, "I don't really do 2-4. But it's fine. It's okay."

Dr. Reid-Brinkley was actually at that tournament, and she said that watching Ryan and Elijah debate...

Was a hot mess.

They just didn't have any chemistry.

There was nothing persuasive about it. Nothing popped about it. It didn't really speak to the judges.

She remembers a time when Ryan came over to her apartment to talk to her and Reshad.

He was just like, "I don't know what we're doing wrong." He just didn't know why things weren't clicking. "What's not working? I don't know what's happening."

So the three of them were all talking, and Reshad... Ryan really looks up to Reshad because Reshad is also a queer black guy, but he's also like a really great debater.

And it was Reshad who said, "You're not being a queer black man. You're being a debater." Reshad would say things like, "You need to butch it out. You need to fem it up sometimes. Sometimes you need to duck walk on them. Sometimes you're going to have to vogue." He's saying be black. "You will always be black and queer in these spaces, so rather than attempting to hide parts of yourself, instead you should be fully you."

Ryan, with this in his head, went back to Elijah. And within a few weeks things started to click.

We were just like, "Here's what our roles are: this is what you do, this is what I do."

This debate is about debate that [inaudible 00:36:02] exclusions perpetuated by the negative...

I would start the debate...

This is our argument about how it is to [inaudible 00:36:07] the strategy that allows for us to not even be those niggers that you say we're supposed to be.

Ryan would preach.

I could reign in the choir, if you will.

That activity is effected by the same structural inequalities that allowed the hood to be segregated.

And then Elijah...

You as a competitor, [inaudible 00:36:22] offense, your argument about how I...

He did the middle speeches.

He dealt with logic, counter-arguments, things like that.

It isn't a question of black goals, it's a question of new epistemologies.

He was better at the game of debate.

Ryan said they went from practicing ethos, pathos, logos, to being it.

We embodied that methodology.

You tell me how their [inaudible 00:36:41] literally deconstructs those that sacrificed inside this debate. You probably...

And then I would end the debates.

That's the shit that our [inaudible 00:36:49] talks about. Now that's some real talk, sweetheart.

In their second tournament, they made it to the finals and they lost in a close decision. But their third tournament was actually a national tournament called CEDA: the Cross Examination Debate Association.

It's called the people's tournament.

And they won that tournament.

I was able to give a pretty good 2AR and we ended up squeaking the debate out.

And then, their fourth tournament... their final tournament together... it's actually the whole reason we're telling this story. It's the NDT.

The National Debate Tournament. That was the tournament.

My decision not to go for a [inaudible 00:37:25].

The NDT is this marathon of a debate tournament.

[inaudible 00:37:30].

It's like March Madness or something. It's held every year.

[inaudible 00:37:36].

It lasts for four whole days and there's 13 rounds of debates, 78 teams.

The NDT is where Harvard is, Northwestern...

Georgetown...

[inaudible 00:37:53].

That's the tournament that they prepare for.

That's the tournament those sorts of teams usually win.

So we're definitely the underdogs. An all black team had never gotten past quarterfinals of this tournament.

Things kick off Friday morning at 8:00 AM. Emporia versus Idaho State. And they beat Idaho State. At 11:45 AM, they take care of Puget Sound. 4:15 PM, they go against Oklahoma. Oklahoma actually beats them, but it's prelims, so it's not like they're out or anything. Then the crazy thing is that after the loss to Oklahoma, Ryan and Elijah go on a roll. They take USC, they roll over Emory, they beat not one, but two, different teams from Harvard. They beat Michigan State, and then on the last day they beat another team from the University of Michigan, then they go on to beat Wake Forest. That puts them in the semis, which has never been done before by a black team. Then they're against Oklahoma, who they beat and that puts them into the finals.

Everything is very surreal to me. We're in the finals of the NDT. Never happened before. We're also potentially about to unite the crowns, and what that means is win CEDA and the NDT. No team in history had ever done that.

And who were they up against?

They were going against a team that Ryan had already faced twice that year.

And lost every time.

The 14 time national debate champions, Northwestern University.

When this round gets set up between Northwestern and Emporia, one of the things that we've described it as is a clash of civilizations.

She says that about Northwestern because they have one of the biggest debate programs in the country.

They've got an entire hive mind with a hotel war room for them to strategize in.

And then it was us, these two queer black guys from Emporia, Kansas.

From a really small school with not a lot of resources. So it is like a David and Goliath story.

Let me explain the room to you all. This is the biggest room that I had ever debated in.

This hotel room that they have the debate happening in is a huge ballroom.

Welcome to the final round of the 2013 National Debate Tournament.

And this ballroom was packed.

The audience itself was segregated. One the right side of the room, Northwestern's side, it was packed full of their people. And then on our side, it was...

Was it like racially segregated, too?

Just to round this out...

The judges for this evening's debate are...

Near the front of room at a table were the judges, which included our guy Scott Harris.

And how many judges were judging this debate?

Five. Four men, one woman. All of them were white.

The affirmative team in tonight's debate will be Emporia State University.

Ryan and Elijah from Emporia, they were one side of the stage. On the other side of the stage are the two Northwestern students.

Wearing our Northwestern jerseys.

One was this guy.

I'm Arjun Vellayappan. I debated at Northwestern for four years.

The other was his partner: a young woman named...

I don't know if she knew this, but she was like my college debate nemesis.

My partner Peyton, I was a sophomore, whereas my partner and Ryan on the other side were seniors.

And that was the thing that really getting me. It was going to be my last debate. It was Peyton's last debate. It was my last debate. We were seniors. This was it. College debate is the pros. It's the NFL. It's it.

Since it's their last debate, everybody gets up before their speeches to say thanks and bye.

I want to thank Northwestern for providing the opportunity to make debate a home.

And for myself...

This is Ryan.

This is my last debate.

This is going to be my goodbye, so it might take a bit.

This is Peyton.

Debate has been my family and my friends. It's my hardest work and my most rewarding play. It's taught me more than I could've ever dreamed. For that, I'm indebted to all of you. Every part of this community, and in particular a number of special people in my life.

The topic for the year was whether or not the United States federal government should increase incentives for certain forms of alternative energies.

It was nuclear power, solar power, wind...

Or reduce restrictions on other forms of alternative energies.

Coal, natural gas, and oil.

So Ryan and Elijah were affirmative. They were supposed to argue something positive about how the US government should support solar energy production or should restrict coal usage and energy or whatever, but they're not going to debate that.

We had figured out that we wanted to talk about the idea of home.

In other words, energy isn't the most important conversation that we need to have. The conversation we need to have is whether this community can include people like Ryan, like Elijah.

Can we find home in debate?

Because that's how the community feels about itself: that this is a home place for a lot of people. There are people who grew up in debate, people who started debating when they were 12 and 13, went all the way through college. The people that you often develop that tightest friendships with, the people that have some of your coolest memories because you all spent the summer together going to debate camp, those people make up your family. There are people who make friends in debate when they're 13 that they keep until they die.

So Ryan is up first. To make his argument about his home...

Judy Garland references the great [inaudible 00:43:46] of Kansas when she told audiences that there was no place like home in the Wizard of Oz...

He starts about a movie.

Have you all seen The Wiz?

Real quick synopsis. It's a 1978 film and what it is it like an all black cast version of the Wizard of Oz. So Michael Jackson is playing the Scarecrow. Richard Pryor is the Wiz. And Diana Ross is Dorothy.

That movie was just like, to me, it was the fear that Dorothy felt...

Where am I? Where am I?

At the beginning of arriving to Oz.

The indivisible land of Oz.

Oz? I want to go home.

The point Ryan is making is that's how he felt too when he came into debate, when he was walking into that cafeteria.

There's a line where you say... let me find it... "When the Dorothys of this world think of energy, they don't think of thorium reactors, but the energy required to get out of bed and navigate the struggle.

Is that how you were tying it?

Yeah. Energy for us meant what it meant to get out of bed in the morning, what it meant to thrive in a world in which you were never meant to survive.

And for Dorothy...

She was able to reach a place of Oz.

Please, is there a way for me to get home?

Where you realize that all you ever needed in the first place was yourself.

Home? Inside me?

And that you had the power all along. That's part of what our argument was and that was part of what I was trying to say, was that I had been in debate for eight years at that point, and I was so sick and tired of people telling me that what I had to say about debate and what I thought about debate wasn't legit, when debate was a student-driven activity: that I have just as much to say about this topic as you do, and your claims are not any more valid than mine, and vice-versa.

Ryan ended his eight and half minute speech on this hopeful appeal.

You know, to never give up. We have to ease on down the road together. Dorothy can't just go by herself.

Judy Garland might have much over the fabulous Diana Ross, oh but honey, she did have one thing right in that is there no place, [inaudible 00:45:57], no place like home.

After a few minutes, Arjun, the sophomore from Northwestern...

I got up and I gave the first negative speech.

[inaudible 00:46:17].

He started to make his argument.

The one that they had beat us with every time.

Called topicality, which basically says the topic has posited a question.

You know: "Should the US government alter its approach to energy policy?"

And we think the affirmative should have to answer that...

Or this isn't a real debate.

Well, first of all, I don't think the resolution is a question.

Second of all, nowhere in the rules does it say that you have to be topical.

This is a debate about [inaudible 00:46:47].

Our position was that debate should be theoretically fair. Both sides should be able to win.

And if you're going to come out here and argue that...

Racism is bad, debate is not a home...

We can't argue against that.

I'm not going to say debate isn't a home for me. I love it.

It's not fair to have to argue against that.

We form ourselves, as ourselves...

Is debate fair for now? Who is debate inclusive for now?

Is it actually fair if, in order to win a debate, you need to have a whole research team and debate camps that cost thousands of dollars to participate in...

Also, [inaudible 00:47:18].

There's a topic that's democratically voted upon by all the schools at the beginning of the year. Something about the topic should be mentioned just to give the negative respect: respect for the thousands of hours that my partner and I in the Northwestern debate team and other people in debate have spent researching energy and being prepared to talk about the intricacies of energy policy in the United States.

This went on for over an hour.

It was a lot happening.

And eventually, Arjun and Peyton start to focus their argument on their version on debate: the tradition version. "This is how you actually change the world: not by focusing on yourself, but doing research. It's being able to argue the affirmative side of something and the negative side of it, because people who learn those kinds of skills...

They can actually go and do things outside of debate.

Like deal in convoluted globalized trade negotiations, or solve global warming.

So after two hours of this, it's almost midnight. Ryan feels exhausted.

Yeah, but I felt it in the room that people were like, "We're not out of the debate. We can still win."

At this point, there's only one speech left, and it's Ryan's.

I was nervous. I knew it was last speech. I knew everybody in the audience was waiting on me. I just felt pressured and I had maybe five sentences written on a piece of copy paper. I looked over at Elijah and was kind of like, "Well, this is it. This is all I've got."

The audio quality of this speech is kind of terrible, but we're just going to let it play.

[inaudible 00:48:59] in this debate for you to both of teams that best performed [inaudible 00:49:02] methodologically bring this debate back home, I don't think they have really answered this [inaudible 00:49:07] argument that [inaudible 00:49:08] are not allowed in their debate. All of their evidence assumes the role of a good citizen or an engaged student in a democratic society. All of these assume an equal playing field for people, but [inaudible 00:49:18] discussion of the access or even the right to have a home in the first place. This leads to black [inaudible 00:49:23] our job [inaudible 00:49:24] in a moment of [inaudible 00:49:28] to be self-reflective that enabled them to speak out, as a way to engage and change our relationship to the world, and also to ourselves, which says that regardless of whether or not we're using the tools of the master or if we're just simply...

And Ryan says early that piece of paper he was holding...

I threw it. I start speaking from my soul, or what I will call the [shaunde 00:49:50].

The shaunde.

The shaunde is the place that encapsulates your soul and your loins.

Well, all right.

It's always about something not fair. It's always about a [inaudible 00:50:02] fucking [inaudible 00:50:03], but the question then becomes, how broad do we get? When does their research model ever access our portion of the library? When do we have a discussion about those individuals. Their method of debate has become foreclosed to those individuals who have already had access to homes now for what they are. Argument [inaudible 00:50:21] black [inaudible 00:50:22] bodies do not have a space that they can call home right now, and we need to join the struggle together. We need to hold hands and be [inaudible 00:50:30] Michael Jackson and ease on down the road together, which is exactly what our affirmative is. It allows us [inaudible 00:50:37] to raise the question of why is it that in debates it's a question of either/or instead of hand-and-hand.

Their notions of fairness is one that is always [inaudible 00:50:45] because debate is [inaudible 00:50:47] for who now? Debate is equal for who now? It's still leaves us out! Why do I have to make a forced choice? Why do I got to relegate another team to the exclusion, especially one that don't have another place to go, when debate has been the place where I come to share my views, perspectives, and opinions about a given subject? This is all the [inaudible 00:51:05] I got.

I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do when this debate is over. I don't know how I'm going to situate myself. But I know one thing that I'm going to do: I'm going to make [inaudible 00:51:13] that have never, ever fucking had a right to speak and have a debate in their own fucking house! Nobody ask me about energy production! Nobody asked me what it means to get out of bed in the morning, which is why [inaudible 00:51:26] never, ever, fucking [inaudible 00:51:28] me! We are the education that your model of debate bring [inaudible 00:51:32] because we can you teach you some shit about yourself and how you're complacent with the strategies in debate that allow us to be exclusionary to other individuals. Our fucking job...

There was portions of the speech that I don't remember giving. Apparently there was a part where I almost took my shirt off. I almost ripped my shirt off. Like, I don't remember that. I had to pause because I was trying to get out of that zone and come back to provide a voice of reason, but as I kind of slowed down to do that the crowd started clapping. I had 50 seconds left. I still have to answer this last thing. I still have to extend this piece of evidence. Oh shit, I didn't say anything about warming. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

I just was like, "I don't know. This is reason enough to vote affirmative. Forget it."

I think that the judges should vote affirmative in this debate. Blessings on [inaudible 00:52:35].

And then, I walked over and shook their hands. I gave Elijah a hug. And then I walked out of the room and went and smoked a cigarette.

At that point as a judge, I took a deep breath, packed up my notes. I put noise-canceling headphones on my head. I found a room where there was no one else around and I could have total quiet and think about what had been said.

Now, Scott says that he felt like the debate was close, like it was going to be a tight vote.

So I sit down and I look at my notes. I relisten to the last couple of speeches that I had recorded several times.

On one hand, Northwestern presented a lot a good research, and a lot of it he agreed with. On the other hand, Peyton and Arjun are saying, "If you have these skills then you're going to be better prepared to go talk in front of Congress or something." But Scott says, "If you just listen to Ryan and Elijah, they sound more persuasive. You can't convince that somebody who sounds like that isn't actually also prepared to do those things." Ryan and Elijah's whole presentation is actually proof that Peyton and Arjun's argument is invalid.

At the same time, he thought, "There have to be things that we all just agree on as our starting point."

And if the alternative is a world in which the affirmative can come into a debate and talk about anything they want to talk about, then the ability to make that a fair competitive environment seems a little problematic.

I think Scott was torn.

It took me about 45 minutes to an hour to decide who I thought won the debate.

Are you all ready?

Ryan says that when he was sitting there waiting for the decision to be announced...

I was very convinced that we lost.

And eventually...

They announced the decision...

The three-two decision. Three judges voted for Emporia and two for Northwestern.

He was like, "It's a 3-2 for the affirmative from Emporia."

My partner Elijah jumped up. He was like, "Yeah!" People were crying.

I mean, if you could have seen this room erupt into joy... I was in tears watching this historic moment happen because I had been around for so long and I'd watched so many black debaters fail to make it to that top point.

I stood there and I was like, "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god." I said it like a million times. "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god."

What swayed Scott in the end?

He actually published this 11 page essay all about his decision explaining why he voted the way he did. There's a lot in there, but what I take away from it is that while maybe he didn't like that there was a disregard for the topic, he would've liked it a whole lot less if Ryan and Elijah hadn't been in the room.

I mean, debate itself is incredibly important to me. Debate has been the greatest influence in shaping who I am as a person. In many ways, I view debate as my home, and given that it was a debate that challenged and criticized the activity that I have made a home for the last 40 years, that pointed out weaknesses, it caused me to reflect.

Wow. So their argument really worked.

I find this kind of like it's either a segregating or an integrating event. My sense is that it's integrating. In a racially chilly world, this is a strangely warm spot.

Are you saying no?

When asked about how he felt about winning this tournament, I expected him to be really celebratory and tell me that it changed his life. He was the first black student to win this tournament and it seemed important to me. But he didn't really go there.

You don't seem as proud as I want you to seem. Why don't you?

You know, it was a good thing for history, and it was a good thing to motivate people. I just want to stay focused.

It was an important win. It was significant. It was powerful. It was beautiful. But it was very clear to us very early on that not much had changed by the time we got into the next year.

Shanara Reid-Brinkley says that since Ryan's win there's a backlash. The next year another black team broke through. It was two black women this time, and that caused this big controversy and people were saying that the state of debate was ruined. In that same year, you even had a group of schools breaking off to form their own tournament where performance styles wouldn't be invited.

I think all of this makes Ryan not really know how to feel about his win. Maybe sometimes, for him, it can feel like an anomaly.

It sort of seems like there's a series of accidents here. You're in school, where accidentally you have a teacher who pushes you... pretty much forces you... into something which suddenly takes you over. You turn out to be peculiarly good at it, almost by accident. Then you're thrown into this sequence of events where you get to meet Elijah and then almost by accident you become a champion and then suddenly it's over.

The whole thing feels strangely lonely. Lonely, but beautiful. I wonder how it feels to you.

Ironically, the same.

That is the first time that you've agreed with Robert this entire interview.

Oh, stop. I just got to give him a hard time and vice-versa.

Huge thanks to Abigail Keel for reporting that piece. Abigail works for an amazing podcast called the Longest Shortest Time. You should definitely check them out. Thank you Hillary Frank for letting us borrow Abigail. This piece was produced by Mr. Matthew Kielty.

We also had original music from Matt and from Dylan Keefe.

And special thanks to Will Baker...

[Myar Milum 00:59:50]...

John Delimore...

Sam [Mour 00:59:53]...

Tiffany Dillard-Knox and Mary Mudd...

Daren Chief Elliot...

And Jody Hobb...

And Reshad Evans.

Okay, I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

Thanks for listening.

Start of message.

Hi, this Arjun Vellayappan from the debate story. I'm just calling to read out the text for the credits, so here goes nothing.

Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is the director. Sound design is Lauren Wheeler. Senior editor [inaudible 01:00:26] and Molly Webster, with help from Alexandria Lee Young, Tracie Hunte, Stefanie [inaudible 01:00:35], and Michael [inaudible 01:00:35]. Our fact checkers are Eva Astrid and Michelle Harris.

Thanks. Looking forward to the story. 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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You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. Before we get started I had a couple of questions for you. Yeah, please. Fire away. I've talked to a lot of people who you've attempted to contact. There's a lot of hesitation. People just don't have faith in media right now, and considering our issues, to be honest, white-controlled media.

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In August of 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th an…

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PAT WALTERS: Hey, this is Pat Walters coming at you today with the final episode of our Radiolab mini-series on intelligence, G. And so for this last episode, we wanted to shift the mood a little bit. Because as we were putting this series together, we did lots of stories on human intelligence, but we also found ourselves thinking about intelligence in other animals. And so to get into that, we decided to host an event all about animal intelligence. And today, we're gonna share that event with you. Just a quick warning, there are some curse words in the show, so bear that in mind.

PAT: Kind of had to use the guys, obvious choices. But we also invited one more surprise judge.

PAT: Macy is a dog, she's about 35 pounds, has scruffy brown fur. She trotted right onto stage and hopped onto a chair next to Jad and Robert.

PAT: So once we had our judges set, we brought our contestants onto the stage. And the way it worked is they each had four minutes to make case for why they thought their animal was the smartest of them all. And at the end of each round, the judges would vote and we'd bring out the next two contestants.

PAT: Tracy Clayton hosts the hit podcast Another Round, and more recently the podcast Strong Black Legends.

PAT: And Jordan Mendoza is a comedian, a writer for Comedy Central, and hosts a live comedy and science show in Brooklyn called Drunk Science.

PAT: So first round: crow versus slime mold.

PAT: Five crows wearing brightly-colored hats, one of them's smoking a cigar.

PAT: Then Tracy showed a video of a crow and a half-empty glass of water. And the crow kept adding stones into the glass until the water was at the rim and the crow could get a treat.

PAT: Uh, it's actually two and a half years.

PAT: Next up was Jordan Mendoza with the slime mold. He put up a slide of a Petri dish with this, like, yellow lightning bolt-y streak going across it.

PAT: Jordan put up a picture of Gary Busey. If you don't know what he looks like, Google him.

PAT: Then Jordan went on to explain how slime molds look out for each other in this amazing way.

PAT: Again, two and a half years.

PAT: So the judges voted in favor of the slime mold, and after that we brought up our next set of contestants to defend a whole new pair of animals.

PAT: Dan Engber is a writer for Slate and the New York Times Magazine. And Laurel Braitman is the author of the best-selling book Animal Madness, and a teacher at Stanford.
[AUDIO CLIP: Sperm whale clicks.]
PAT: At this point, Macy had curled up into a ball, kind of taking a back seat on judging.

PAT: So at this point, the first round was finished. The judges had weighed in on some pretty compelling cases for the crow, the slime mold, the sperm whale and the chicken. Next up, we had another round of competition. Same basic idea. We asked our four contestants to bring a smart animal to the table to make a case for, but this time we threw a couple curveballs at them. That, and the final crowning of the world's smartest animal after a quick break.
This Nan DeRosa from Amsterdam. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
PAT: So in part one of our competition, we heard arguments for the intelligence of the crow, the slime mold, the sperm whale, and the chicken. And in part two, we decided to raise the stakes a little, give our competitors a couple more challenges.

PAT: First up were Dan and Laurel, who had absolutely no trouble at all agreeing on a smart furry mammal.

PAT: Next up were Tracy Clayton and Jordan Mendoza.

PAT: And agreeing on an animal was a little bit harder than they expected.

PAT: Tracy kicked it off for team marsupial with this adorable little creature called the quokka, which looks sort of like a chubby squirrel with these teddy bear eyes and little black gloves.

PAT: So at this point, Tracy had an illustration up on the screen of a mom tossing a baby into a basketball hoop.

PAT: And Jordan decided to fight for kind of a weird choice.

PAT: It was time for the final judging.

PAT: But before the judges even had a chance to all weigh in ...

PAT: A pretty serious incident of bribery went down.

PAT: So to keep things fair, we decided to just throw the whole thing over to the audience. To vote with their applause for their take on the smartest animal of the evening. So just to recap, the contenders were the crow, the slime mold, the sperm whale, the chicken, the raccoon, and the marsupials. And the winner according to the audience was ...
Hi, this is Spike calling from New York, New York. Radiolab is created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Suzie Lechtenberg is our Executive Producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Nora Keller, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee, W. Harry Fortuna, Ruth Samuel, Imani Leonard, Neel Dhanesha, Sarah Sandbach and Malissa O'Donnell. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.] -30-

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G: The World's Smartest Animal | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

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PAT WALTERS: Hey, this is Pat Walters coming at you today with the final episode of our Radiolab mini-series on intelligence, G. And so for this last episode, we wanted to shift the mood a little bit.

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subscribe to How I Built This with Guy Raz podcast

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For Christina Tosi, baking wasn't just a delicious childhood hobby - it was a daily creative outlet and a way to blow off steam.

After college, she went to culinary school and honed her pastry technique at high-end restaurants in NYC. But she also craved the opportunity to make unfussy, nostalgic desserts like the ones she grew up eating.

So in 2008, Christina opened her first Milk Bar bakery in the East Village, with the help of her mentor, Momofuku chef David Chang.

Soon, people from around the country were calling her up, begging for her gooey pies, confetti birthday cakes, and pretzel-potato-chip cookies.

Today, Milk Bar has spread to 16 locations, and reportedly brings in tens of millions of dollars a year.

This show was recorded live at The Town Hall in New York City.

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For Christina Tosi, baking wasn't just a delicious childhood hobby - it was a daily creative outlet and a way to blow off steam. After college, she went to culinary school and honed her pastry technique at high-end restaurants in NYC. But she also craved the opportunity to make unfussy, nostalgic desserts like the ones she grew up eating.

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585: In Defense of Ignorance - This American Life

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Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

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This story is part of Only A Game's 2019 Thanksgiving Leftovers Show. Find the full episode here.

One of Only A Game's most popular stories of 2019 was Jill Heinerth's tale of cave diving inside an iceberg in Antarctica. But there was a part of that interview we left out of that original airing, and it has to do with how Heinerth and her colleagues got to Antarctica.

Jill tells that story, in her own words:

The ship's name was the "Braveheart" - great, great little vessel. It was a former Japanese fishing and research vessel - only 118 feet long, which is pretty small, and a crew of 18 people. It wasn't ice-strengthened, but it was a good little ship.

To go to Antarctica from New Zealand is a 12-day sea crossing across the craziest ocean conditions. So, you're constantly in horrendous seas up to 60 feet high. And I asked some of the other people involved. I said, "Well, you know, all the other ships I see in Antarctica - the other four in this part of the Southern Ocean - were all 300 feet, ice-strengthened hull, built in Russia. Big, strong vessels." And I was told, "Well, at 118 feet, you have a chance to kind of bounce in between the waves as opposed to breaking in half." So that was not a lot of comfort for that journey down.

When we loaded the boat in New Zealand, I remember I carried a bottle of beer from Canada. And it was called "La Fin Du Monde," which means "The End of the World."

I remember jumping from the dock on to the Braveheart. And the captain, he was [a] very sturdy looking New Zealander, with big meat hooks for hands. And he wore this pilled argyle shirt and a little vest. But he had this stern look on his face.

And when I jumped aboard, he was rather disgusted that he was going to have to travel with a woman to Antarctica. Because women were "bad luck" on boats. And sure enough, as I jumped on board from the dock to the Braveheart, I slipped and smashed my bottle of the End of the World.

So, that was my christening of the Braveheart.
Jill Heinerth and her colleagues made it to that iceberg. For what happened next, check out our original story featuring Jill Heinerth, which aired on Sept. 21, 2019. Heinerth is a professional cave diving explorer and underwater filmmaker. She's the author of "Into the Planet."

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Christening An Antarctic-Bound Ship With 'The End Of The World'

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This story is part of Only A Game's 2019 Thanksgiving Leftovers Show. Find the full episode here. One of Only A Game's most popular stories of 2019 was Jill Heinerth's tale of cave diving inside an iceberg in Antarctica.

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The Past and The Curious - A History Podcast for Kids and Families

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We love sharing history and music with the world, and we want more people to know about our project. We think The Past and The Curious is a positive addition to the world and a valuable asset to families all over. Lots of our fans agree!!

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JODY AVIRGAN: From ESPN Films and ESPN Audio, you're listening to 30 for 30 podcasts, presented by the Mini Countryman.

Today, the story of a photograph taken in a hotel ballroom by the NBA's Miami Heat. It's a photo that can be seen as the opening bracket of a new era of athlete activism. But more than that, the behind the scenes story of how and why this photo came to exist tells us a lot about our current moment in history and what happens when celebrity, politics and sports come together in a single image.

And now, Hoodies Up.

JODY AVIRGAN: The decision. July 8th, 2010. LeBron James, a native of northeast ohio, announces that he is leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers.

JODY AVIRGAN: Cavs fans felt a deep betrayal.

[FAN #1: "Honestly, I think it was very arrogant and I think it was a slap in the face to this city who supported him and been behind him since he was in High School."]

FAN #2: "I hope he never wins any championships wherever he's at, because he's a loser he's not a winner."

FAN #3: "If you decided that you wanted to go play in Miami, you could've did it in private."]

JODY AVIRGAN: Then, two days later, Chris Bosh announced he was headed to Miami to join LeBron and Dwyane Wade. The decision was widely seen as a clumsy announcement of a cynical choice - three stars joining up to form a super team.

JODY AVIRGAN: Bomani Jones and Wesley Morris, who both write about sports and culture.

BOMANI JONES: We can't forget that they were kind of the villains of the NBA at this point.

WESLEY MORRIS: They were the villains of the league at the time. Everybody hated them and they were dominant and they knew it and the means by which that team came together was just so loathsome and tasteless.

LEBRON JAMES: Not two. Not three. Not four. Not five. Not six. Not seven.]

COMMENTATOR: TNT's COVERAGE OF ALL-STAR WEEKEND CONTINUES ON THIS 67º OVERCAST DAY... ]

JODY AVIRGAN: James, Bosh and Wade were all scheduled to play in that All-Star Game.

JODY AVIRGAN: Since the game was in Orlando, a lot of their followers had made the trip up from south Florida to watch. One of them, was a 17 year-old heat fan named Trayvon Martin. His father is Tracy Martin.

TRACY MARTIN: Everybody knew me as big Trey and him as little Trey. We shared something. He wasn't a Junior but, you know, you couldn't tell him he wasn't a Junior.

JODY AVIRGAN: Trayvon had recently been suspended from school. His father Tracy had sent him from Miami to Orlando to stay with Tracy's girlfriend for a few days. Tracy thought, since the all star game was in town, it would be okay for Trayvon to go to some of the festivities.

TRACY MARTIN: I just, I just didn't want him sitting at home. While he was suspended, so for Trayvon to go and experience being around the NBA players, being around that atmosphere, being around a lot of professional people; I think I just thought that that would give him a sense of humbling himself as far as his school work and getting back, and getting back on the right page.

JODY AVIRGAN: Trayvon and his family did what they could to see their favorite athletes in person.

TRACY MARTIN: They had did a few events. We went to a couple of practices, a couple of press conferences and things of that nature just for them to get a chance to see players from across the league the best players from across the league... That was some special to them.

JODY AVIRGAN: That Sunday night, Trayvon didn't have tickets to the all star game itself, so he watched on TV from 22 miles away at his father's girlfriend's house in Sanford.

TRACY MARTIN: He had been watching the pregame festivities and he decided to get him some snacks from the store before the game actually came on.

TRACY MARTIN: And so Trayvon was.. He was just downstairs just preparing himself to watch the game. He ended up leaving the house going to the to the 7-Eleven never to return again.
[WFTV REPORTER: You can see from Sky Witness 9 HD, this was the scene at the Retreat at Twin Lakes Townhomes in Sanford Sunday night. Residents heard loud yelling and called 911 for the Sanford Police. Moments later, more 911 calls about a gunshot being fired....] [WTVJ REPORTER: It was in Sanford where the 17 year old Kropf High student was killed while visiting his father and stepmother.] [WFTV REPORTER: Killeen Evans's son lives here and heard the shot. Killeen: I was sitting on the couch and then, uh Boom!] [WTVJ REPORTER: Neighborhood watch captain Zimmerman says he shot Martin in self-defense after confronting the teen who was not armed.] [WFTV REPORTER: Police got here within a minute and found 17 year old Trayvon Martin shot dead. Paramedics could not bring him back.] [WTVJ REPORTER: Sanford Police maintain there is not enough information to make an arrest.] [WTVJ REPORTER #2: Baby-faced Trayvon Martin was carrying Skittles and Iced Tea when he was shot by George Zimmerman.]
MICHAEL SKOLNIK: In 2009, there was a young man who was killed in Chicago named Derrion Albert. He was 16 years old.

JODY AVIRGAN: Michael Skolnik is a civil rights activist.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: Derrion had been hit over the head with a two-by-four in a schoolyard fight, or after school fight, outside the school: Fenger High School in Chicago.

JODY AVIRGAN: Along with hip hop mogul Russell Simmons. Skolnik helped run the website Global Grind. The website covered pop culture, but also serious social issues.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: Someone had sent me a cell phone video of this young man's death. When I saw the video and reminded me of a conversation that I had about what happens when a young black or brown kid dies in America, and what happens when a white kid dies?

For years we had memorialized and rightfully so so many white children who had been killed and remembered their names. JonBenét Ramsey was killed almost 20, 20 years ago and we still know her name Natalee Holloway at the time and killed over a decade ago we still knew her name. And when black kids were killed they were statistics there were numbers they were barely ever even mentioned.

And so when I got this video of Derrion Albert this idea hit me that we should create a series of Global Grind he has a name, ultimately became she has a name as well. We published an article in 2009 called 'He Has a Name: Derrion Albert' and that was it.

JODY AVIRGAN: It wasn't long before Skolnik got a phone call from a woman in Queens, New York. She told him about her 13 year old son, who'd been hit by a stray bullet, walking home from school. Her son's name was Kevin Miller.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: And I wrote an article: 'He Has a Name: Kevin Miller.'

Then Ayana Jones gets killed in Detroit... A seven year old girl sleeping in her bed with her grandmother. And we wrote an article, 'She Has a Name: Ayana Jones.' When a mother calls you, or father calls you crying on the phone and saying 'I can't even afford the funeral,' 'I can't even afford a headstone for my child,' and they're asking you just can you please just like tell the world my child existed. My child you know lived 13 amazing years are 17 amazing years. You don't forget it. And there were hundreds and then thousands.

And Trayvon was I don't know Article 922... Article 874... Just 'He Has a Name: Trayvon Martin,' it was another death of another young black teenager in America that we covered.

For weeks, there was no arrest in the case.

Michael Skolnik's he has a name series continued. But he couldn't get the Trayvon Martin story out of his head.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: Somehow some way it felt different than the ones we had covered before. The ones we covered before many of them were you know, you know, violence in the community. Some of them were police violence. Some of them were sort of you know, mistaken identities.

[ MAN: I see that white man, can I stop and detain that white man, start an argument, and shoot that white man to death?

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: We had never heard of this thing... Stand Your Ground Law out of Florida and you could actually kill someone and say I thought I was being threatened therefore I'm innocent.

One of those articles went viral, and he was invited to do interviews on NPR and CNN...

TRACY MARTIN: Michael Skolnik is a great friend of myself and Sybrina, our family. Mike, you know, he, he talked about a lot of the things, his vision of how he wanted to just keep this keep the Trayvon movement active in social media.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: Russell you and I need to pick up the phone and call every famous person we know and tell them to use the powers that they have. Any platform, Web site, social media, Print magazine interviews wherever they're going... Red carpets. To talk about this young man who has been killed.

GABRIELLE UNION: I'm Gabrielle Union.

The first time I heard the name Trayvon Martin was probably on Twitter and then you know living in Florida it was on the news.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: She calls and says how can I help.

GABRIELLE UNION: What I remember is you know Michael and Russ reaching out to me,

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: And the only thing we were looking for at the time was to tweet his name: 'Justice for Trayvon.'

GABRIELLE UNION: As someone who's raising children, as someone who is a global citizen, as someone who gives a shit... It was just it was just a no brainer.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: Please use your platform just to say his name just say his name.

JODY AVIRGAN: As they talked, Union realized that whatever her own celebrity could do to call attention to Trayvon's story, her boyfriend's celebrity was even more powerful.

GABRIELLE UNION: Being closely connected to one of the world's biggest athletes... there could be a potential for a much bigger statement than just the girl from Bring it on.

JODY AVIRGAN: Her boyfriend, now husband, is Dwyane Wade.

DWYANE WADE: MY name is Dwyane Wade. At the time of the Trayvon Martin shooting I played for the Miami Heat.

Me and my wife talk about, you know, everything.

GABRIELLE UNION: He was a young boy,

DWYANE WADE: So when this happened, this was no different, we set down and we talked about it...

GABRIELLE UNION: I know that our boys in the same situation, it could have turned out exactly the same.

DWYANE WADE: She understood the platform that we had.

GABRIELLE UNION: I just implored my husband to, to take action and to talk to Bron, to talk to Chris Bosh.

DWYANE WADE: Me and LeBron was on the phone, we talked.

LEBRON JAMES: My name is LeBron James. Professional basketball player, father, husband, son, friend, philanthropist all that.

We see our kids every day. You know leave the House to go to school or leave the house to go play at a basketball game, or a soccer game, or leave the house to go to the movies... For us to be like 'Hey son,' you know... 'See you later,' and then that doesn't happen... It would just kill us, it would kill us all us fathers and we feel like we didn't do what we had to do. We didn't hold on up our end of the bargain by protecting our kids. And that's why that's why I hit home for us.

And the first conversations happened with myself, DWade, Udonis Haslem.

UDONIS HASLEM: Udonis Haslem, the Miami Heat, power forward.

You know for me it really hit home. I am a Miami Kid. It could've been me. You know, I didn't know him personally, but my family had some ties to his mother and father through church.

JODY AVIRGAN: Wade, James and Haslem decided they would use their social media accounts to send a message to millions of people. The message would be a photograph.

DWYANE WADE: The thing that we felt was probably most impactful was all of us getting together as the Miami Heat team and posing with our hoods on.

LEBRON JAMES: We felt like it was the most powerful. We wanted to do it with the hoodies on, with our heads down, in memory of...

JODY AVIRGAN: They took their idea to the rest of the Heat. Joel Anthony, a Center on that team, was there for the team meeting.

JOEL ANTHONY: We made sure everyone was present so that you know we could we could talk about it. So those those guys could explain what was going on...

DWYANE WADE: We asked all of our teammates, you know, do they want to be a part of this, would they be a part of it?

JOEL ANTHONY: Bron, DWade, UD, those guys are some of the leaders on the court, but off of it as as well.

DWYANE WADE: When you a team that's a championship caliber team, you are very close, you guys know each other kids, each other wives, significant others, so if I'm hurtin and Bron's hurting, everyone is because they know what this means to us and what this means to our family.

LEBRON JAMES: They knew we was knowledgeable about the issue, they knew we wouldn't bring nothing to the team that we didn't feel passionate about.

JOEL ANTHONY: Everyone was on board 100%.

DWYANE WADE: Every player on the team. No one got out of it, no one said I can't be a part of this, no matter what their background was, no matter what their race they was, everybody did it cause everybody understood how important it was.

UDONIS HASLEM: So we had the support of everybody but, you know, sometimes it's not gonna be that easy. Sometimes you might not have everybody's support. You still have to stand up and do what you think is right.

DWYANE WADE: We talked it over with our coaches before we did it, me and LeBron, we went in and went to our coaches and say hey this this what we gonna do. We didn't ask. We said this is what we gonna do, we want you guys to be aware of what we're doing, because it may be backlash.

DWYANE WADE: And I think they understood. I think they understood that a moment like that was bigger than basketball.

JODY AVIRGAN: The conversations took place throughout the third week of March, over a month since Trayvon's death. Still no arrest had been made in the case. But the Trayvon Martin story was getting more and more national attention.

On March 23rd Geraldo Rivera weighed in on Fox.

[FOX NEWS HOST GERALDO RIVERA: I am urging the parents of Black and Latino youngsters, particularly, to not let their children go out wearing hoodies.... ]

JODY AVIRGAN: That same morning, President Obama was asked about the incident.

[PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think all of us need to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen. You know, If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. ]

JODY AVIRGAN: And that night, a Friday, the Miami Heat were scheduled to to play the Detroit Pistons.

LEBRON JAMES: It was actually a game day.

DWYANE WADE: We was on the road, we was in a hotel

UDONIS HASLEM: We took it in Detroit, right before we played the Pistons.

LEBRON JAMES: We had shootaround at the Palace at Auburn Hills, and the we got back to the hotel and had what we call our pregame brunch back at the hotel.

DWYANE WADE: In like one of the ballrooms in the hotel. If you see the backdrop of it, you look at the picture you'll see it's in a ballroom

JOEL ANTHONY: We've taken team pictures before so, you know, we have an idea of how to line up.

DWYANE WADE: LeBron, he's the coordinator, that's what he does, he's the quarterback. You know you've watched him play. So he's directing it. We figured out hey you be here, you be here, you be here. So he definitely directed it, put everybody in their position. Obviously me and him being in you know in the front.

JOEL ANTHONY: We're all together, everyone had their hoodies.

DWYANE WADE: And I think if I remember correctly, one of my teammates didn't have his- didn't come down in his hoodie and it was like we took a hoodie off one of the coaches who had it, like yo, we need a hoodie.

JOEL ANTHONY: Got everyone lined up. And took it. But I can't actually... actually remember who actually took the photo.

JODY AVIRGAN: Wade and James posted on Twitter. As they got ready for their game with the Pistons, they knew the photo would start to go viral.

DWYANE WADE: If I write it on my social media, if I put it on my Twitter, if I put it on my Instagram, if I say it on my snapchat... Oh, it gets across! You know people are watching it!

JODY AVIRGAN: The photograph the Heat took featured 12 members of the team standing, in two rows, in front of the hotel ballroom wall.

JODY AVIRGAN: Their hands are in their pockets, their hoods are up and their heads are down. It's almost impossible to make out player is which.

TRACY MARTIN: The first time I seen the photo of the Miami Heat with the hoods on, I was almost in tears.

GABRIELLE UNION: I just remember just the immense pride that I had, not just for my husband and Bron and Chris, but that it was the whole team.

TRACY MARTIN: Those guys never knew my son, but they were really willing to risk their reputation by wearing the same cloth that symbolized why Trayvon got killed

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: It wasn't just Dwyane. It wasn't just LeBron... It was the whole team... And that shit hit home.

TRACY MARTIN: Having the miami heat in those hoods, it did something to me.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: Here you have the biggest star in the world the biggest star on the planet standing up for a racial justice moment.

BOMANI JONES: it is indicating that look this is getting to a point where even people who have something to lose feel that they have to say something about it.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: It becomes photograph that everybody has to look at, and everybody has to pay attention to - because of who it is.

WESLEY MORRIS: I remember like having this rush of blood to my head and finding the image itself so devastating and also just really as a photograph... Perfect.

JODY AVIRGAN: The week of the photograph, Wesley Morris wrote an article for the website Grantland. The title: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Hoodies."

WESLEY MORRIS: There's no statement in the photograph. The photograph is a statement undo itself. There's no press conference to explain why or what. It isn't them all holding a sign that says, you know, we love you Trayvon. It is just this image.

The hands in the pockets, to me, is the most devastating thing in the picture because there's something about the way the heads are hung and the hands are in the pockets that just like... It just it connotes shame.

WESLEY MORRIS: I was really hung up on the hoodies. That hoodie is such a character with such a character for me in in this in this fiasco.

JODY AVIRGAN: Bomani Jones.

BOMANI JONES: The one thing I remember about the image - they all looked so decidedly, for lack of a better term - regular.

WESLEY MORRIS: I mean one of the glorious things about it and lots of things typically associated with black people it has been mainstreamed into meaninglessness. The hoodies shouldn't mean anything because we all wear them.

BOMANI JONES: That is, quietly, one of the few items of clothing that everybody wears.

LEBRON JAMES: I don't know anyone that doesn't own a hoodie, and that's just a form of attire. All of us athletes love putting on hoodies for comfort.

WESLEY MORRIS: In the context of this story it is it's a target. It is a symbol of, or a signifier of of of a threat if your hood is down and you put it up you have weaponized your garment at least according to certain spectators like the George Zimmerman's of the world. And Trayvon of course is aware of this and the hoodie goes up as a defense. Right. Like I don't want you to see me.

DWYANE WADE: You know sometimes you have hoodie on because of you know people don't ask for privacy when you do it because it's late. You just said you look in the way you want to look or you're tired. You put a hood on... At some point, everyone has put a hood on.

WESLEY MORRIS: And yet it is still loaded garment for many other people and a lot of black people who wear it know that to be the case and if they didn't know it in 2012, they definitely know it now.

TRACY MARTIN: I think Trayvon's story was the story that. Woke America up not only black America, but America in general.

TRACY MARTIN: All the meat was in the pot. All the potatoes were in the pot. It was just really you know that pot was just waiting for someone to turn it on and it just so happened when the killer of our son went home to sleep in his bed that night that turned the pot on that ignited the fire.

GABRIELLE UNION: The conversation just never ends because the the murder of black people never ends. So the photo was just one rock you know in a very long pathway

JODY AVIRGAN: The photo helped push the Martin story - and the deaths of young black men - to a new level of cultural attention.

It also resonated deeply in the sports world - sparking a conversation about when and how athletes should address political issues. Michael Wilbon, responding to the photo on Pardon the Interruption.

MICHAEL WILBON: for decades now we've gone into this place, and I'm talking about famous black people, where there was a fear, particularly athletes, a fear of offending other patrons, their owners, the league... And at one point in time guys like Russell Alcindor, Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Oscar Robertson, and Muhammad Ali... They led the discussion of any cultural discussion whether it was political or not and then there was a fear of it. I'm glad the players weren't afraid.

BOMANI JONES: And I wonder I mean I very often wonder if that had not gone over the way it did, how does it go? The Trayvon Martin situation? Because I think LeBron had developed an awareness by the time 2012 came around that all the affection he had gotten from people prior to that was pretty conditional.

GABRIELLE UNION: And with that team in particular, from 2010 with Bron's decision and the amount of scorn the man got for taking agency over his life, you realize people are going to talk but fuck them.

LEBRON JAMES: You know for me I think you know I was just a sign of growth. And I don't know if this if this was the moment that sparked some for me to speak upon social issues. This was one of the beginning of it, this was one of the things that sparked it. I know you know what I like to talk about. I have to be educated about issues. but I think it all starts from an individual being comfortable in their own skin and know who they are.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: As Harry Belafonte said when the movement is strong the music is strong.

When the movement is strong. The music is strong.

GABRIELLE UNION: When the fans start having conversations on social media or, you know, at the sports bar or in their own homes those are the conversations that we need to move the needle forward.

MICHAEL SKOLNIK: At this point in America, on March 26, 2012, the movement was strong and the music had to respond to the movement and the music was that Miami Heat putting their hoodies up.

We stand in solidarity with this young man and this family and that's because the movement was strong and we hadn't seen a movement this strong in 30 plus years.

WESLEY MORRIS: I do think this I do think this photograph sits at the same table as the photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos from the 68 Olympics where they're on the podium raising their fists... It is a protest photo. It is a photo that at the same time. It is a photo that simultaneously embraces being American while criticizing a certain aspect of living in this country.

LEBRON JAMES: I know Muhammad Ali and you know and Jackie Robinson and Oscar Robertson and you know Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Jim Brown... I know those guys spoke about a lot of stuff going on in their days and then I know after their reign, the conversation kind of stopped you know certain athletes didn't speak upon things and that's ok. I mean it's is to each his own.

If this his photo, and if this moment was the rekindle of the fire for athletes to speak upon things then I guess we did our job.

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On the night of the 2012 NBA All-Star Game, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. Five weeks later, his hometown team the Miami Heat took a photo wearing hoodies to protest his killing. Hoodies Up tracks how the photo came together, and its impact on our current era of athlete activism..

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Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Solve For X
About Clayton Cameron's TED Talk
Percussionist Clayton Cameron dissects the mathematics of improvisational jazz, demonstrating how numerical patterns make him a better musician.
About Clayton Cameron
Clayton Cameron is a percussionist who prefers brushes to sticks, and has spent his career perfecting the art of brush technique. After college, he was hired as the drummer for Sammy Davis Jr. and recorded 15 albums with Tony Bennett. In 2012, Cameron released his first album, Here's to the Messengers: Tribute to Art Blakey.

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Clayton Cameron: What Are The Mathematics of Jazz?

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Jill Heinerth is a professional cave diving explorer and underwater filmmaker. She's done work for PBS, National Geographic and the BBC, and she's one of the most accomplished cave divers on the planet.

Back in 2001, accompanied by expert diver Paul Heinerth and underwater cinematographer Wes Skiles, Jill Heinerth captained an expedition to the B-15 Iceberg in Antarctica. Here's her story ... in her own words:

People look into caves, and they see nothing but darkness, terror, fear, claustrophobia. I look into a cave and I want to know what's around the next corner.

My partner and I wanted to pitch a project to go to Antarctica. We had been watching satellite photos of this great crack slowly opening up in the Ross Ice Shelf, and as we were getting close to making our pitch, the largest moving object on our planet broke away from Antarctica.

It was an iceberg the size of Jamaica. So we decided that we were going to go to Antarctica and be the first people to ever cave dive inside an iceberg.

When we pitched our project to National Geographic, they said, "Wow, there's caves inside of icebergs?" And we said, "Hell yeah, there are caves inside of icebergs!" But the truth was, we didn't know. We figured that, if this great crack had broken this piece off the ice sheet, then there had to be other cracks. It was simply a hypothesis.

The moment I saw this white pinnacle of ice for the first time, standing like a mountain on the ocean, my heart was racing. It was beautiful. It was sculptural. And I also had a feeling of reverence. This ice is endangered. And I had the sense that I was looking at something that would never be the same again. And so I felt very privileged.

The first dive, I was actually a little nervous. I wasn't nervous for myself as much as I was for Wes and for Paul, because this was their first ice dive. This was the coldest dive either of them had ever been on.

We picked this beautiful iceberg that we called "Patience Camp," and we pulled our Zodiac boat into this little bay. Wes rolled off the boat, the water started pouring into his suit, and he should have gotten out of the water immediately. He decided he wanted to shoot one minute of footage so he could see what this new camera would produce.

One minute is dangerous. I mean you very, very quickly lose the ability to manipulate your hands or operate or even think straight.

By the time he'd shot a minute of footage, he was almost incapacitated. He's wearing, basically, a bag full of water. And we've got to get him into the boat. And it was scary. We had the first mate tugging on him and Paul and I trying to push him. And then, when we rushed him back to the Braveheart, we had to strip him down and get him into a bunk with sleeping bags to warm up, because he had already been in the water too long.

We were all very experienced cave explorers. I was familiar with all of the issues that could happen to our gear because of the ultra-cold water, the additional risks from ice diving. But what we didn't understand, really, was the environment we were going to put ourselves into in these iceberg caves.

When we decided to do our first dive inside an iceberg, it was really exciting. And I was a bit nervous. Wes and the first mate stayed in the boat, and Paul and I rolled off into slushy, chunky water.
Into The Unknown
When you first jump into the water you get an immediate "bang" - assault like an ice cream headache from the water hitting your face. And you take a few very quick deep breaths in order to knock back the cold. And, dropping your face in the water, the first thing you see is this mixing slurry of slush and melting fresh water mixed with the saltwater. And it's almost impossible to focus. And then you have to sort of push that aside, and the little chunks of ice, and then slowly descend down, dropping into this unknown.

So there was this deep vertical fissure crack. And Paul and I descended down this crevasse. And we went down and down and down into the darkness, until we suddenly came upon the sea floor. And it was about 130 feet deep - deeper than we originally thought we might want to dive in Antarctica. But there at the bottom, as I turned to my right, was a passage.

I realized we had found it. That we were in this environment that nobody had seen before.

The ice around us was blue and white and clear - sometimes like a robin's egg, sometimes like deep turquoise. But the sea floor was red and orange and yellow - every warm color - and the contrast was stunning.

And it was covered with a shag carpet of filter-feeding organisms. So there were sponges and little Christmas tree-shaped worms and things that looked like miniature palm trees sort of wafting in the current.

And then, all of a sudden, there were these isopods. They were kind of like something between a spider and a lobster, about the size of my hand. And they started raining down from cracks over my head and crawling along the floor and hitting my camera and landing on my shoulder. It was like horror story material.

"It was like horror story material."
Jill Heinerth

The sea floor has its own unique sound. It kind of reminds me of - as a kid when you'd eat that Pop Rocks candy, and you just hear the clicking, almost. And as we swam deeper and deeper into the [ice]berg, there were also strange cracks and pops and groans from the ice. It was moving, it was shifting, it was changing. And I remember at one point a very deep groaning vibration sounded. And I felt it all the way through to my toes. It was that loud.

And we kind of looked at each other and looked at our equipment, and everything seemed fine. But, when we finally turned around on that dive and worked our way back slowly to the entrance, there were big, giant pieces of ice where we had entered this cave. And the doorway we swam into was gone.

People often say, "You must be fearless." And I am not fearless. I try to do everything to prepare for risk, and I work through my head how I'm going to solve that. But you can't always predict what's going to go wrong when you're doing something that's never been done before.

And so coming back to the doorway of a cave and finding that suddenly closed is like, "Oh, my God." Every breath is currency, and I only have so many of those in my equipment. So every breath marches me either ever closer to success or ever closer to death.

' All They Could Do Was Wait'

So, as we approach these giant blocks of ice, we searched for a way around and through them and slowly, bit by bit, found a way out.

Now, we had to make a stop. We had to hang in the water about 20 feet deep before we could rise back to the surface. And that's part of just readjusting your body to the surface pressure. And when I looked up from that 20-foot stop, I saw Wes and Matt, the first mate, standing and high-fiving. Celebrating, obviously.

They told us about what it was like when that iceberg calved and that big chunk of ice sloughed off and closed the doorway and sent this great wave almost capsizing them in the Zodiac. It was terrifying for them. And the whole time, they were waiting and waiting and waiting and not knowing if we were alive or dead. They knew that there was no way to mount a rescue. And all they could do was wait.

By the next day I thought, "OK, I know more than I did yesterday. We're gonna give it another try." It's still guesswork, and it's still a risk, but I guess in that moment I felt it was a risk worth taking.

The entrance looked stable, and everything looked fine. We dropped quickly down to the bottom and went in and started photographing some of the life.

And slowly I noticed that the current was picking up. It was getting a little bit stronger and a little bit stronger. And, all of a sudden, rapidly, it was racing. And I remember sort of digging my hand into the sea floor to stop myself from rushing forward. It felt like dough. And my whole body kind of cartwheeled around my hand.

As we turned back towards the exit, we couldn't kick hard enough to move forward. And we realized the current had us. And we looked at each other and went, "Oh, boy. We're being sucked inside the iceberg."

But we could see blue light in the distance. We knew there was another exit. And, in a very quick decision, Paul and I decided to go with the flow and go towards the other doorway. But when you're inside an iceberg, you don't have a sense of how far that blue light of the doorway is from you.

And as we started to rush with the current towards that light, we kept drifting and drifting and drifting, and it didn't seem like it was getting much bigger. And we went and we went and we went until we finally reached this doorway. I thought, "OK, we're out."

And when my head broke the surface, there was ice around me. And it was higher than I could see over. And I couldn't see the boat.

"We looked at each other and went, 'Oh, boy. We're being sucked inside the iceberg.' "
Jill Heinerth

And my heart just hit my stomach. I felt like a gnat on the back of the planet. Time gets so compressed and takes on a strange nature when you're scared. When you think there's a possibility you might die and everything's out of your control. I'm not sure if it was 15 minutes or half an hour, but I was getting cold. I was shaking when, suddenly, I heard something. And what had happened is the current had knocked the boat off its anchorage just as it had flushed us through the iceberg, and they were pulling up the anchor to reset it.

And in the process of that chain being yanked up onto the boat, the boat moved, and I saw a small glimpse of the stern swing around the edge of the vertical side of the iceberg. I went, "Oh! There they are!" And I heard in the distance Wes's voice, the sweetest sound I've ever heard, say, "Is that ... Jill?"

And he spotted us on the horizon and then was slowly able to move the Braveheart towards us and get us out of the water.
'Mother Nature Had Given Us A Final Warning'
Our final dive inside Ice Island, Wes decided he was going to join us. He decided that the images that we'd brought back were so compelling that he wanted to shoot it with the best camera that we had.

We dropped down to the sea floor and moved our way inside. And, very quickly, that current picked up again. And so I turned to Wes and Paul, and I put my thumb in the signal that indicates that it's time to turn around and go.

But as we wheeled around, we realized that we might not be able to get out. And we pulled and pulled and dived our hands into the sea floor, and we weren't making our way forward. I mean, my biceps, my triceps, my forearms were shaking - pulling with every bit of energy I had to get back towards that crevasse. We just couldn't make our way forward. I was leading, Paul was behind me, and Wes was losing ground. And he yelled out, "Help me with the camera!"

And I thought "F the camera! We might die!"

I was angry. And Paul dropped back to help Wes. And I was mad at him too because I thought, "Come on you guys, you can't do this."

And they together managed to work the camera towards the entrance. But, even at the entrance, I didn't know how we were going to get up the crevasse, because this water was pouring down the crevasse. And it was so strong. It was pressing us back down every time I tried to move up.

So I looked around. I thought, "What are we going to do? How are we going to climb these walls?" It's just ice. It's slippery. I touch the wall, and it just slides down.

And then I remembered these little ice fish that we'd been studying that were about the size of my thumb. And they were living in these burrows inside the ice. And I thought, "climbing holds." I could jam a finger into that hole, and maybe I can have enough grip that I can pull my way up and get back towards the surface that was still 130 feet over our heads.

And I inched my way up, hole by hole. And Wes and Paul got there too and started to follow along, until we could get up out of the crevasse and out of the stream of current.

I remember getting back to the boat after the dive. And I was feeling quite solemn. And the science officer reached down. We were already two hours overdue, so he was relieved to see us. And I remember looking up and saying, "The cave tried to keep us today."

Mother Nature had given us a last warning.

Like good, creative people, it's never enough. You always want more. We decided we wanted to do one more dive. So we prepped our equipment, we went to have a meal and sit down and plan one more dive - a dive that we would do at the moment when the current slackened.

And as we were having a meal, we heard screams on deck. And we dropped everything, and we ran up the companionway, up onto the deck. And there was our iceberg - the cave that we had just been inside of - breaking into pieces, heaving up in the sea and sending these giant waves towards our boat. The whole square mile of ice we'd just been inside of was breaking apart and dissolving into the sea.

I was just standing there, gobsmacked on the ship's rail. I realized that if we had been in the water, we'd be dead.

When we came home and tried to tell our story, most people just thought we were insane. "How could you do that? How could you go in over and over and over again?" And, "Boy, you were lucky. You're an idiot."

But for me, it was so worth it to have that experience, to document a place that maybe no one will ever see again.

We don't know whether the B-15 iceberg was truly just simply evidence of climate change, or whether it was a part of the evolving changes in the Antarctic ice sheet. It's impossible to know.

But I do know that it was important. It was important for us to go and document that environment and everything living around it. And I'm glad to have had that experience and glad to even have had those brushes with death that made me a better, safer diver in the future.
Jill Heinerth is a professional cave diving explorer and underwater filmmaker. Her new book is called "Into the Planet."

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'The Cave Tried To Keep Us': The First-Ever Dive Inside An Iceberg

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Play Jill Heinerth is a professional cave diving explorer and underwater filmmaker. She's done work for PBS, National Geographic and the BBC, and she's one of the most accomplished cave divers on the planet. Back in 2001, accompanied by expert diver Paul Heinerth and underwater cinematographer Wes Skiles, Jill Heinerth captained an expedition to the B-15 Iceberg in Antarctica.

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The coronavirus pandemic has affected the economy, travel and much more. Sports have been no exception: Leagues and organizations have suspended their seasons and tournaments.

This week, Mike Pesca, host of the daily Slate podcast " The Gist," and Shireen Ahmed - Toronto-based sportswriter and co-host of the " Burn It All Down" podcast - join Only A Game's Karen Given to discuss the impact of coronavirus and more.
Highlights From The Conversation: Karen Given On The Olympics Going Ahead ... For Now:
"[Olympic] organizers say they're in touch with the World Health Organization, and I'm just going to trust that they're listening to people who are more knowledgeable about how diseases spread than I am. ... But I am concerned that they haven't made any sort of public statements about what to do in the meantime because roughly half of the athletes have already qualified - OK, they can probably continue to train without exposing themselves to anything - but the other half of those slots are still up for grabs."
Shireen Ahmed On Rudy Gobert:
"One of the questions that a lot of people were asking was: How is it that Rudy Gobert, who basically poked fun at all of this, was so quickly tested, and that's something that most Americans don't have access to?"
Mike Pesca On The Financial Repercussions Of The Coronavirus On Sports:
"The players ... though they have 'Force Majeure' clauses in their contract - so they don't have to get paid [if there's], say, an act of war or an epidemic - there are good relationships [with] the owners. It seems unlikely that the owners will withhold money.

"The owners themselves: most of their money comes from television contracts, and there might be some various 'make goods' but you could also see ... them and their television partners working together so that no one really loses money.

"The people who would lose money are the per-game workers at the arenas."
More Stories You Should Know

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Coronavirus' Impact On Sports (And A USWNT Lawsuit Update)

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The coronavirus pandemic has affected the economy, travel and much more. Sports have been no exception: Leagues and organizations have suspended their seasons and tournaments. This week, Mike Pesca, host of the daily Slate podcast " The Gist," and Shireen Ahmed - Toronto-based sportswriter and co-host of the " Burn It All Down" podcast - join Only A Game's Karen Given to discuss the impact of coronavirus and more.

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JAD: This is More Perfect, I'm Jad Abumrad. Season three...season three! This season we're gonna do something different from what we've done in the past.
VOX: Alright, off the top of your head can you tell me how many amendments there are to the American Constitution? VOX: No mam I can't-- VOX: Too many-- VOX: I don't know. I don't think I can name any of them. VOX: Twenty-something. Offhand, I don't know. VOX: I have no idea, I'm guessing somewhere around 10. VOX: I would guess somewhere around 20. VOX: 21, or 23, 24, 25. VOX: I know there are at least 25--
JAD: There are 27 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. And in season three, we are going to focus on those words...let me explain why.
MUSIC: We the people, in order to form a more perfect union...
I mean first of all, the name "More Perfect," the name of this podcast... comes of course from the preamble to the Constitution-- and the reason we chose that name--
TAPE: In this country, man walks with dignity...
JAD: Well, couple reasons. I mean first of all, it's a weird phrase, you can't really have something be ' more perfect' because 'perfect' is an absolute...but beyond that.

The phrase sort of gestures at this idea that America is constantly evolving. That it's never done. That we're always in this process of trying to drag ourselves out of the mud and get to those ideals. To make ourselves More Perfect. To be More Perfect. Very often we don't make it. Very often. But we're always trying, and that is embodied in our founding document. I mean, we wrote this thing called the Constitution and then we kept changing it. Amending it, adding in new rights, filling in holes where we've failed so that we don't fail again.

So far we've done that 27 times.

This season, we're gonna look at all 27.

What do they mean? Why are they important? How do they hold us together, in these turbulent times?

But the thing is, when you read these amendments, the words themselves, can feel very abstract. Very musty. Very far away.

So...we decided to make an album. An actual album.
[PREVIEWS OF SONGS ON THE ALBUM]
JAD: In the spirit of Schoolhouse Rock--
KASH DOLL SONG: Freedom, freedom...
JAD: We reached out to some of the best artists and musicians in the world, we asked them to make a song about an amendment to the United States Constitution.
KASH DOLL SONG: Free at last, thanks to the 13th Amendment...
JAD: No idea if this was gonna work, but we put out some calls...and we got all of these amazing artists to participate in this compilation. Kash Doll, who you just heard. Dolly Parton-- the Dolly Parton wrote a song for us about the 19th Amendment. Devendra Banhart wrote a song about the 25th Amendment, the impeachment amendment.

After two years of continuously working on this, we are super proud to announce: "27: The Most Perfect Album."

Which is now on Spotify, iTunes, all the places. And you can listen to it online right now, in its entirety-- and it's amazing-- at themostperfectalbum.org

Now in the podcast season, which begins now, what we're gonna do is tell stories about these amendments. Sort of like little audio liner notes to accompany the songs. These will be funny, sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, sometimes poetic-- little stories about the amendments that hopefully explain what they are, and why they matter to us now.

So, to get started.
Jeffrey Wright: First Amendment. Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." [TAPE/MUSIC MONTAGE] [CHERRY GLAZERR SONG]
JAD: That was one of the submissions that we got for the First Amendment by the band Cherry Glazerr. You can hear that song and everything in its entirety at themostperfectalbum.org. We actually got two submissions for the First Amendment-- gonna play you another one in a second.

First, the liner notes for the First Amendment, which come from More Perfect producer Sarah Qari.

Sarah, you ready?

SARAH: Um, OK. Here it goes.
Burt Neuborne: This is a this is this is a funny story. Burt Neuborne: This is a this is a story about my about my technological incompetence.
SARAH: This is Burt Neuborne.
Burt Neuborne: I am the Norman Dorsen professor in civil liberties at New York University Law School.
SARAH: He's like...casually a big deal.
Burt Neuborne: I was the national legal director of the ACLU under Ronald Reagan, and...I've been I've been a constitutional cop. I mean I'm someone who tries to enforce the Constitution for more than 50 years. Sarah: And I remember you saying that you've argued cases in front of the Supreme Court, right? Burt Neuborne: Yeah. I've argued a number of cases myself in the court, and have written the briefs in upwards of 200 of them. so I've spent a fair amount of my time waiting on the Supreme Court steps for opinions.
SARAH: Ok so-- one summer--
Burt Neuborne: This is um, this was in the mid 90s.
SARAH: When he was just starting out as a professor...

Burt Neuborne: 1995, 1996. I had a wonderful assistant who worked for me and she'd been with me for years and one day she said to me Professor Neuborne, I'm so tired of taking your handwritten drafts, typing them up and then having you, you know, giving you the typewritten version, then you change it, then I have to retype it. Have you ever heard of this thing called a laptop or you know, a computer?

SARAH: She basically says to him: you know crazy idea, why don't you just... learn how to type?
Burt Neuborne: That way, we could make the changes much faster, I wouldn't have to retype all the time, and you'd find it much easier to work. And I said No I'm too old for that. I don't know how to type, I never learned to type. I can't I just can't do it. Let's just keep going. I like writing by hand it makes me think. Burt Neuborne: And she said well I'm going to do you a great favor. She said I'm not going to type your stuff anymore. And I said "No no no, you don't understand how it works. I'm the boss, you're the employee. I tell you what to do. You type this if I tell you." And she said "No no no, you don't understand. I know who you are. You're not going to fire me. Learn how to use the computer. It's the best present I can give you." Burt Neuborne: So what do I do? I took my laptop and and I decided I would learn how to read...how to use WordPerfect. SOUND FX: WordPerfect Suite 8, loading. Burt Neuborne: Which was the program that everybody was using in those years. So what do I do? I type out the-- I type the Bill of Rights out. SOUND FX: [slow typing] Burt Neuborne: that's the text I know best.
SARAH: So the Bill of Rights starts with this text. That basically says, we the States-- we think that this Constitution needs some work. It doesn't do enough to give the people rights. To protect them from all of this power that the government has. So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna throw in these extra rights. These extra protections that we think, really, every American should have.
Burt Neuborne: And so one of the things I wanted to do was figure out how to move text. You know, you highlight the text and you can move it from one place to another. So I was practicing on how to learn how to highlight text. And so I type the Bill of Rights out, all ten amendments. Um, and then I start practicing by highlighting portions of the text. Jeffrey Wright: Congress shall make no law... Burt Neuborne: I move the First Amendment to the-- Jeffrey Wright: The right of trial by jury... Burt Neuborne: Seventh Amendment. Jeffrey Wright: ...Or involuntary servitude.. Burt Neuborne: And the Seventh Amendment I move up to-- Jeffrey Wright: ...the number of electors... Burt Neuborne: The First.
SARAH: Copy, paste, copy paste...
Jeffrey Wright: Excessive bail. Jeffrey Wright: Search and seizure. Jeffrey Wright: Quartering soldiers. Burt Neuborne: And I'm moving stuff around. Jeffrey Wright: Cruel and unusual punishment. Burt Neuborne: But-- every single time I move it around it around, it looks wrong. It just looks wrong. There's something that tells me it's not-- you know, it's it's something fundamentally flawed in it. Burt Neuborne: So first I thought well, it's because you're so used to seeing it the old way that seeing it the new way is more than-- you know, is something that you really can't process. But then I realized you know, I don't really look at it very much as a whole anyway! I mean I would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly what words came where. I then-- I began to realize that there is in the text that we have, the ten amendments that we have, a deep structure. The same kind of deep structure that you'd find in a poem.
SARAH: Take, for example, the First Amendment.
Jeffrey Wright: First Amendment. Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Burt Neuborne: It consists of six ideas. Jeffrey Wright: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion--
SARAH: One.
Jeffrey Wright: Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
SARAH: Two.
Jeffrey Wright: or abridging the freedom of speech,
SARAH: Three
Jeffrey Wright: or of the press;
SARAH: Four.
Jeffrey Wright: or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
SARAH: Five.
Jeffrey Wright: and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
SARAH: Six.
Burt Neuborne: It's only 45 words long. Could have been written on the back of an envelope.
SARAH: These days the First Amendment is wrapped up in all kinds of thorny stuff. Like, kneeling at football games, and hate speech, and money in politics...but if you just step back from all of that-- and you read the text of the First Amendment, and you really try to think about what the words are trying to say-- you find that the logic behind it is...kind of beautiful.
Burt Neuborne: The order of the words in the First Amendment is the life cycle of a Democratic idea.
SARAH: Here's what he means.
Burt Neuborne: So those first two clauses-- Jeffrey Wright: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; Burt Neuborne: Create a free space inside your mind to think and believe as you wish.
SARAH: That's the Founders saying, that space inside your head, where you think your thoughts-- that's sacred. The government can't touch that.
Burt Neuborne: Without that free space, there can be no self-government.
SARAH: So that's the first idea. The freedom of your thoughts.
Burt Neuborne: Once you've believed and thought something, then then it's natural for you to want to say it.
SARAH: Which brings us to the next clause.
Jeffrey Wright: Or abridging the freedom of speech. Burt Neuborne: The speech clause says, if you have an idea formed in the freedom of your mind, by all means go ahead and share it.
SARAH: So you have the freedom to think a thought, the freedom to speak that thought--
Burt Neuborne: But that's not enough... if you really want to make a real dent in a society. So you need some way to be able to speak to a mass of people. To speak in a very loud voice.
SARAH: Which brings you to the fourth clause.
Jeffrey Wright: Or of the press, Burt Neuborne: Then, once you've gotten your message out to a large number of people, when people have listened to these ideas and moved by them, it's natural for those people to want to do something about it. To move together, to organize. Jeffrey Wright: TAPE: My body my choice! Or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Burt Neuborne: But that's not enough. Finally the petition clause, which is the sixth idea-- the petition clause says, once you've assembled, once you've organized-- TAPE: We demand the protection of our First Amendment rights! TAPE: We assert! We assert! Burt Neuborne: Then you have a right to take your argument to the government... Jeffrey Wright: And to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. TAPE: We speak for this country and we demand reform now! Burt Neuborne: And force the government into confronting it and either accepting it or rejecting it. And then that government, if it says no, is subject to being voted out of office. So this is Madison giving us the blueprint for democracy. The big bang, when democracy begins. Sarah: The way I'm hearing it is like, like concentric circles, like starting in inside the mind of one person and then reverberating out.
SARAH: Which is speech...amplified.
Burt Neuborne: That by the way, is the only time in human history that those six ideas have ever been united in a single text. Only time. I went back and looked at every single rights bearing document in our tradition-- all the way from the Magna Carta through the English Bills of Rights through the colonial charters through the state constitutions-- Sarah: Oh wow. Burt Neuborne: --through the other through the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It's never been done before. To put the six building blocks of democracy together in a single coherent text. Burt Neuborne: The First Amendment is the ideal city on the Hill that the Founders were trying to establish, and remember, establish for the first time in human history.
SARAH: So you can think a thought, you can speak that thought, you can create a movement--

Burt Neuborne: Yeah exactly, the First Amendment is a series of concentric circles beginning within your mind and then moving to your close acquaintances. Then to the society at large, then finally to the entire polity to the entire people.

JAD: That was NYU professor Burt Neuborne and More Perfect's Sarah Qari...with liner notes for the First amendment.
STYLEZ: On my track, Ghost Dance Part 2, I was dealing with the freedom of religion. From 1870 up until 1934 it was illegal for Native Americans to practice our ceremonies. I had in mind specifically the Ghost Dance because in 1890 at Wounded Knee, 150 to 300 mostly women and children were massacred for Ghost Dancing. And to me that shows that they were scared. They were scared of us having our culture and ceremonies because they empower us. I truly hope the warrior spirit shines on this track and our natural side of being wild and free sets the tone. Aho. [JOEY STYLEZ SONG]
Now as I mentioned, we got two songs about the First Amendment. We left it open for people to choose whichever amendment inspired them the most.
[MIDROLL BREAK]
And the other song about the First Amendment we got is from an artist named Joey Stylez. He is a First Nations, Canadian rapper and hip-hop artist. And he, you might say, took that idea of the gleaming city on the hill...and looked at its underbelly.
Jeffrey Wright: Second Amendment, right to bear arms.
JAD: That was Joey Stylez with his song about the First Amendment. The Second Amendment is up next. This is More Perfect, Most Perfect Album. I'm Jad Abumrad. We'll be back in a minute.

JAD:This is More Perfect, I'm Jad Abumrad.

JAD: Ok, so this amendment...kinda hard to summarize.

Here's what we'll do...last season, More Perfect did a very deep dive into the truly surprising history of the Second Amendment, how these 27 words and 3 commas became America's favorite fight.

So in about five seconds we're going to put that back into the feed.
Jeffrey Wright: Second Amendment, right to bear arms:
If you want the Cliff-Notes version, here it is...
Jeffrey Wright: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The text itself:
Jeffrey Wright: A well regulated Militia,
JAD: Here's the text:
Jeffrey Wright: being necessary to the security of a free State,
JAD: The first thing to notice about the text is it's a weird sentence. Grammatically, it's very strange.
Jeffrey Wright: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
JAD: comma--
Jeffrey Wright: shall not be infringed.
JAD: comma--

JAD: comma--

JAD: Does that scan, totally? I'm not sure. I mean, obviously this amendment is about the right to bear arms...but who-- for whom? Who has the right?
Jeffrey Wright: "a well regulated militia"
If you diagram the sentence, it seems to offer two potential answers to that question.

In the first part of the sentence, you get:
Jeffrey Wright: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed
JAD: One answer, which is the militia has the right to bear arms. If that's the case then maybe only the people in the militia have the right to bear arms? So ok people in the army have a gun but the rest of us don't necessarily have that right.

If you just look at the first clause you might come to that conclusion, but then later you've got that second clause...

JAD: ...here you have the PEOPLE's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

Alright so first you have the militia and then you have the people...
Jeffrey Wright: A well regulated militia.
Are the people, the people in the militia? Or are the people a larger category than the militia. Are we talking about all people here? If that's what they meant, why would you start the sentence with the militia? Which, I don't know, it's weird. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. To me, at least.
JILL LEPORE (FROM SEAN'S "GUN SHOW"): Except for the Third Amendment. There was no amendment that was less written about, less legislated, less debated, than the Second Amendment.
Now one of the things that many historians will say about the Second Amendment, aside from the fact that it is confusing, is that, for many many years, it was assumed that the first part of the sentence

JAD: That was the important part. And they'll tell you that for a long time, no one really cared about the Second Amendment.
[FAST CUTTING MONTAGE FROM MORE PERFECT'S "THE GUN SHOW"]
JAD: According to historian Jill Lepore, people didn't think about it, they didn't argue about it.

But then-- you get this crazy chain of events...

JAD: Now, we read the Second Amendment very differently. We take the first part and we basically forget it and we just focus on the second part.

To some Americans, this is a sacred right. A symbol of freedom from an oppressive government.

To other Americans, it's an offense.

And so that grammatical confusion that once was there but ignored, now has been clarified but replaced by an even larger confusion. A deep, gut-wrenching confusion.

That will probably be with us for a long long time.

Listen to the episode.
[FLOR DE TOLOACHE SONG]
JAD: OK, so for the our album about the amendments we got THREE submissions for songs about the Second Amendment. You can listen to all of them at themostperfectalbum.org.

One is by a group called Sateen, another by a musician called Michael Richard Klics, and another by an all-female mariachi band called Flor de Toloache. All three of the songs are pretty badass, but we will play you a bit of this one. Here's Flor de Toloache:

JAD: That was Flor de Toloache with their song inspired by the Second Amendment.
Jeffrey Wright: Third Amendment. Quartering of soldiers. No soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. NEWS: We don't hear much about the Third Amendment. ORNY ADAMS: We don't even know what the Third Amendment is, do we? Does anybody know what the Third Amendment is? NEWS: The Third Amendment is sort of the forgotten amendment. I bet most lawyers probably couldn't even tell you what it says. ORNY ADAMS: Nobody's ever argued the Third. Nobody's ever taken the Third. Or cited the Third. I got pulled over the other day. The cop says you know you're driving alone in the carpool lane. I go yup. That's my Third Amendment right.
OK moving right along, we've done the First, done the Second, sort of.

Now?

JAD: Here's producer Julia Longoria.

Julia: So I've talked to several people about the Third Amendment, and they all point me to you. You are the Third Amendment man. So how did this happen to you?
Tom Bell: I went past the first and second, figuring other smarter and more knowledgeable people had covered those. I got to the Third, though, and I realized, after some research, no one had said much about the Third Amendment, bless its neglected heart.
Tom Bell: I think nobody else wanted the job. But boy they missed out.

JULIA: Professor Tom Bell.. is kind of a hipster of Constitutional law. He's a sucker for obscurity.

JAD: Sorry Julia, just to barge in for a second. It feels appropriate actually.

JULIA: And rude, but yeah, sure. [laughs]

JAD: But on point, on topic! Just to explain the Third Amendment for a second. All that the Third Amendment really says is soldiers are not allowed to barge into your house the way I just did in your story. They're not allowed to do it.
Jeffrey Wright: No soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner.
JULIA: They're not allowed to come into your house and then stay in your house.

JAD: Right. Which might sound to us now, like, yeah. Why would we need a rule saying that? But the people who wrote the Third Amendment were worried about this. Because it had happened. During the Revolutionary War, British soldiers had basically treated the people of Boston like hotel owners. They barged into their homes. They stayed in their homes while they fought the war. The people of Boston were not happy. And so the Founders wrote the Third Amendment.
Tom Bell: Yes yes. They didn't really grapple much with what is quartering but they did ask, is this a soldier?
JAD: Which, thankfully looks kinda musty to us right now. Because that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. Right?

JULIA: Uh, well not so fast. You're right that there's never been a Third Amendment case in the Supreme Court. Never. And that's why this recent, relatively obscure case in the state of Nevada caught Tom Bell's eye.

JULIA: It starts...with a phone call.
FOX NEWS: Local police officials called Mr. Mitchell up in the morning and said can we use your house to watch this fellow.
JULIA: To a man named--
FOX NEWS: They had received some information that his neighbor was engaging in domestic violence and they wanted to watch him for a little while. Mr. Mitchell said I really don't want to get involved. And they hung up the phone. RT NEWS: According to court documents, after breaking down Anthony's door, the cops yelled profanities and fired multiple pepperball rounds at his dog. And Anthony, while he laid in a fetal position. Tom Bell: What I understand is his claim is premised on the police qualifying as soldiers because they have military apparatus.
JULIA: Anthony Mitchell... from local police.
Julia: They ate his food? Like they went in his fridge? Tom Bell: Yeah so he thought he had a quartering claim. I'm sympathetic to the complaint. If you look at our police, this is not Andy Griffith on Mayberry RFD anymore. ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW CLIP: That was good goober ... You gotta show me how you do that. Tom Bell: These are guys in black face masks and helmets with-- UNKNOWN: Heavy armor. Riot gear! Tom Bell: Truncheons and tear gas. UNKNOWN: M16 rifles. Armored vehicles so big you need a crowbar to open the door. Tom Bell: In what look like tanks. They look like armored troop carriers anyhow - on our domestic streets! It's very upsetting. The Founders probably didn't think seriously about you know, should this apply to police, because they didn't think about police. Much less the kind of militarized police that we have. So that's another reason to be sympathetic to this. Meh, I mean. I never had much hope in that-- that complaint. It's just, you can't put that heavy burden on the slim shoulders of the Third Amendment. That's just not what that amendment is for.
JULIA: They wanted to use his house as a kind of lookout to spy on his neighbor.
Tom Bell: Because they're not soldiers. They're not.
JULIA: Unfortunately, Anthony Mitchell wasn't able to go on the record about this. But according to court documents, Anthony claimed that the police quartered themselves when they stayed in his house for about nine hours. And not only did they stay there and apparently shoot pepperball rounds at his dog, but--

JULIA: The judge in Nevada agreed. Anthony's Third Amendment claim was shot down. Court said that basically, when it comes to the Third Amendment, the police don't count.

JAD: Has anyone ever gotten any farther with that argument?

JULIA: No because there haven't been very many Third Amendment cases at all. Like, you think about all the First Amendment cases and Second Amendment cases that have been brought forward, that didn't go anywhere. There aren't very many Third Amendment cases even in the lower courts.
Tom Bell: There were U.S. and British troops tramping around the east coast.
Tom Bell: And that to me was a puzzle. I had to do some further research. And I discovered, holy mackerel. The Third Amendment has been violated time and again-- massively!-- in U.S. history. And most of the time no one apparently even noticed. First violation I could find was the War of 1812.
Tom Bell: Troops in the house. Burnt down the house. That's quartering.
JULIA: That's [the] U.S. fighting Britain.
Tom Bell: You can read it in the facts. This was quartering. Shall I continue? Because I've got more! The worst was World War II. This is the one I discovered most recently. This one really breaks my heart.
JULIA: U.S. troops took over a bunch of farms. Burned them down.
Tom Bell: This chain of islands up the kind of chin of Alaska. If you look at a map it has that long kind of beard out in the ocean. The Aleutian Islands. And pretty quickly, the federal troops appeared in the Aleutian Islands and said to the islanders, you're in the way. ALEUT TESTIMONY: All the military men-- all of a sudden, they were there. It seemed to me like overnight. Tom Bell: We have their testimony. It's very touching. ALEUT TESTIMONY: Somebody came to our door and said we have to get ready because we will be taken off the island very soon. Tom Bell: You had a bunch of boys a long way from home, lightly supervised. They tear the places up, they burn 'em down, they steal things. That's quartering. You know the only thing we could ask for is if they were wearing red coats and tricorn hats. You know how much more obviously do you need to have this spelled out to you? That's quartering. No. Body. Said a thing.
JULIA: Similar thing happened in the Civil War.

JULIA: 1941. U.S. declares war on Japan. They send troops to the Aleutian Islands.
PALEHOUND VOICE MEMO: Hi, this is Ellen from Palehound. For my song, I chose the Third Amendment, which states that you are not required to house soldiers in peacetime. That doesn't really apply to modern life at all, so I Kind of chose to write a song about keeping violent people out of your life. [PALEHOUND SONG]
Tom Bell: You end up feeling, frankly, a little ashamed for the legal system. How did all these victims suffer these violations. And no lawyer could pick up a Constitution and notice that? It's shameful. To me, the Third Amendment. It's like a canary in the coalmine. It tells us: how are our rights doin? Our really plainly spelled-out Constitutional rights. THIRD Amendment, right? That's like bronze in the Olympics. It's right up there at the top. How we doing on that? Terribly. It's been violated many times. It's mocked. It's ridiculed. When it is violated, courts say 'Well, who knew about that. That's not a serious Constitutional violation. Maybe next time.' I really hope for more from my Bill of Rights and my government.

JAD: OK. Julia Longoria, Tom Bell with some liner notes for the Third Amendment. Here's the song. Comes from the band Palehound.

JAD: That's Palehound with a song inspired by the Third Amendment. I love the lyrics: "You shoot your guns in my backyard / You crush my flowers and scar the lawn / With laws on my side I'm not letting you in tonight."

Both Palehound and They Might be Giants wrote original songs for us about this amendment.

To listen to both go to themostperfectalbum.org.

Our website is super cool, by the way. We've got amazing artwork depicting each of the amendments, might actually make you laugh out loud, some of it. They are all by artist Luis Mazon.

Also, we collaborated with the National Constitution Center to write about each of the amendments in a way that is super easy to understand.

Go to themostperfectalbum.org to check it all out.

More Perfect is produced by me, Jad Abumrad, Suzie Lechtenberg, Julia Longoria, Kelly Prime, Sarah Qari, and Alex Overington with help from Elie Mystal, Michelle Harris, and David Gebel. Nora Keller is the reason our album "27: The Most Perfect Album" exists. Thank you Nora.

And thank you to actor Jeffrey Wright for spending an afternoon with us, donating his time to read all of the amendments. We're super grateful to him and to all of the musicians who donated their time and energies and talents to this project.

And we're grateful to you for listening.

I'm Jad Abumrad-- we'll be back very soon with more episodes.

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The Most Perfect Album: Episode 1 | More Perfect | WNYC Studios

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JAD: This is More Perfect, I'm Jad Abumrad. Season three...season three! This season we're gonna do something different from what we've done in the past. VOX: Alright, off the top of your head can you tell me how many amendments there are to the American Constitution?

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‎On this episode of Can We Talk About This? Ben and Aileen discuss the current pandemic, COVID-19, that is currently affecting the entire world. How can we help prevent the spread? What are our thoughts on how the world is reacting? This, some chewing noises from eating our lunches, and more.

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America's favorite pastime seems to be plagued by tragedy. Former NFL players have come forward to say they're suffering from a serious brain disease. Others have ended their lives. So we wanted to know: how risky is playing football? Neuroscientist Dr. Kevin Bieniek, neurosurgeon Prof. Bob Cantu, and neurologist Dr. Ira Casson weigh in.

Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2mWkuyR

Selected references:
Credits: This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Meryl Horn and Lexi Krupp. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We're edited by Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. Recording assistance from Dennis Maler. A big thanks to Prof. Adam Finkel, Prof. Rudy Castellani, Assistant Prof. Robert Lynall, Dr. Eckhard Mandelkow, David Chalmers, Buddy Teevens, and many more. Plus a special thanks to Jim Grau, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.

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America's favorite pastime seems to be plagued by tragedy. Former NFL players have come forward to say they're suffering from a serious brain disease. Others have ended their lives. So we wanted to know: how risky is playing football? Neuroscientist Dr. Kevin Bieniek, neurosurgeon Prof. Bob Cantu, and neurologist Dr. Ira Casson weigh in.

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This week, we're listening back to some favorite Fresh Air interviews from the past decade. Terry Gross spoke to Miranda in 2017 about how his "mixed tape" musical came together.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. We usually spend this time of the season revisiting some of our staff's interview picks for the year. But since this is 2019, we're widening the scope and presenting some of the staff picks for the entire decade. Today, the focus is on Broadway musicals. And our guests are some of the artists behind some of the biggest hits of the decade. Later, we'll hear from TV's "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, whose musical "The Book Of Mormon" premiered on Broadway in 2011 and became a major hit.

The biggest hit of the decade was written by our first guest, Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical "Hamilton" won 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Miranda wrote the music, the lyrics, the book and starred on stage in the original cast. Almost five years since it premiered in 2015, "Hamilton" remains the hottest ticket on Broadway. Miranda's first Broadway show, "In The Heights," was a musical set in a Latino neighborhood in New York similar to the one in which he grew up. In 2008, that show also won the Tony for best musical. Terry Gross spoke with Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2017 after he had left his starring role as Alexander Hamilton. But his hip-hop musical about the Founding Fathers remains a cultural phenomenon.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: OK, so I want to talk to you about Hamilton. And so let's start with "My Shot."

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: Sure.

GROSS: And this is Alexander Hamilton making his big statement about how, you know, he's come to America. He's going to make it. And he's not giving away his shot. You know, and first, it's going to be in the Revolutionary War and then in the new American government. So let's hear some of it, and then we'll talk. So this is Lin-Manuel Miranda from the cast recording of "Hamilton."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY SHOT")

MIRANDA: (Rapping) I am not throwing away my shot. I am not throwing away my shot. Hey yo, I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy and hungry, and I'm not throwing away my shot. I'm 'a get a scholarship to King's College. I probably shouldn't brag, but, dag, I amaze and astonish. The problem is I got a lot of brains but no polish. I got to holler just to be heard. With every word, I drop knowledge. I'm a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal trying to reach my goal. My power of speech, unimpeachable. Only 19 but my mind is older. These New York City streets get colder. I shoulder every burden. Every disadvantage I've learned to manage. I don't have a gun to brandish. I walk these streets famished. The plan is to fan this spark into a flame, but damn, it's getting dark so let me spell out the name. I am the A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R. We are meant to be a colony that runs independently...

GROSS: That's Lin Manuel-Miranda from his cast recording of "Hamilton." So you are so incredible at these, like, intricate rhymes that you do in this show. How do you assemble all these intricately placed rhymes?

MIRANDA: For me, the fun of writing "My Shot" was it's Hamilton's declaration of purpose. And I wanted to demonstrate his intellect and his ambition not just in what he was saying but in the way he was saying it. So prior to his arrival and singing "My Shot," the other guys in that bar - right? - Laurens, Mulligan and Lafayette - are rhyming at the end of the line. It's (rapping) I'm John Laurens in the place to be. Two pints of Sam Adams, but I'm working on three.

We rhyme at the end of the line. And then here comes Hamilton. And suddenly, you're getting a lot of internal assonance and a lot of internal rhyming and not content to just rhyme at the end of the line but, you know, have these big pun-esque lyrics, you know? (Rapping) I know the action in the street is exciting, but Jesus, between all the bleeding and fighting, I've been reading and writing.

So it's - they're intricately tied together. And if you consider that Hamilton is delivering this in real time, suddenly you're like, whoa, this is the greatest freestyler who ever lived (laughter). And so that was the fun in constructing that. And it was many days and months of work to sort of make his lyrics just that much more intricate than everybody else's.

GROSS: Because he was so smart and verbal...

MIRANDA: Yes.

GROSS: Yeah. So do you use any tools like a rhyming dictionary? Do you catalog words? Do you have, like, lists of words that you - like, when you were doing your research, did you write down key words that you thought would be good to use in lyrics and so that you'd have a kind of storage box of, like, words or phrases that you could work with?

MIRANDA: I would love to tell you that that's exactly what I did.

GROSS: (Laughter).

MIRANDA: That would seem like I took such care. But honestly, I kind of throw the kitchen sink at whatever situation I'm in at the moment I'm writing. So I remember when I got up to Lafayette's section and being, like, wow, I don't even have conversational French. So going and figuring, how do you say [expletive] you in French? How do you say - how do you count to 10 in French? I didn't know any of these very elementary things - and doing research just to be able to have it feel tossed off by Lafayette - a mix of French and English while he is learning English in the original colonies.

And that was, you know, that amount of time that I spend for those two lines and also sort of a love letter to Lancelot in Camelot, which is my mother's favorite score. So have him ending his line with "C'est Moi," which is Lancelot's big tune - that's my little love letter to Lerner and Loewe, just him saying that. So the answer is no, I kind of - I stop and research whatever situation that's in. That being said, I did have Ron Chernow's book as a guidepost.

GROSS: Do you do anything to be able to capture the speed without tripping up your tongue? Does it get harder or easier over time when you're doing the same, you know, raps every night? And again, it's really fast, intricate lyrics, and you have to get them on the beat and do it without stumbling.

MIRANDA: The fact that I'm a performer helps me enormously as a lyricist. I wouldn't give a performer something I couldn't deliver myself, with the occasional exception of Daveed Diggs, who's just so exceptionally articulate and able to articulate at high speeds that I give him some raps that I probably couldn't deliver the same way at that velocity. But I'm not trying to make something that is difficult to perform every night. It needs to proceed at the speed of that character's thought because that's the only way it's actable. But, you know, it's interesting. I think the - it was an enormous challenge to do that show every night. And yet who to blame but myself?

GROSS: (Laughter).

MIRANDA: I wrote the part. And it was also the most thrilling roller coaster every night. You know, I got to fall in love. I got to win a war. I got to write words that inspired a nation.

GROSS: So "Hamilton" has such an interesting connection to the White House for two reasons. The show basically originates at the White House. You started off thinking of "Hamilton" as a concept album about Alexander Hamilton, and the first time you performed one of the songs - the opening song from the show - it was at the White House. What was it - like, an evening of American music or something that Michelle...

MIRANDA: Yeah. It was evening...

GROSS: ...Obama presented?

MIRANDA: ...Of poetry and spoken word. Yeah. And it was in about May of 2009. You know, fresh new administration - and thrilled to be asked.

GROSS: Let's hear a little bit of that performance at the White House from 2009. Here's Lin-Manuel Miranda.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MIRANDA: I'm thrilled the White House called me tonight because I'm actually working on a hip-hop album. It's a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

(LAUGHTER)

MIRANDA: You laugh. But it's true. He was born a penniless orphan in St. Croix of illegitimate birth, became George Washington's right-hand man, became treasury secretary, caught beef with every other Founding Father - and all on the strength of his writing. I think he embodies the word's ability to make a difference. So I'm going to be doing the first song from that tonight. I'm accompanied by Tony-and-Grammy-winning music director Alex Lacamoire.

(APPLAUSE)

MIRANDA: Anything you need to know - I'll be playing Vice President Aaron Burr. And snap along if you like.

(Rapping) How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar? The $10 Founding Father without a father got a lot farther by working a lot harder, by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter. By 14, they had placed him in charge of a trading charter. And every day while slaves were being slaughtered and carted away across the waves, our Hamilton kept his guard up. Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of. The brother...

GROSS: That's Lin-Manuel Miranda performing the opening number from "Hamilton" at the White House with Michelle and Barack Obama in the audience. So let's skip ahead - when Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended "Hamilton," and he was cheered - he was booed when he was there. And then when the show was over, Brandon Victor Dixon, who now plays Aaron Burr, came out and read, like, a little speech directed to Mike Pence. And I'll read some of it for our listeners who might not have heard this yet.

This is what he said. (Reading) Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you, and we truly thank you for joining us here at "Hamilton: An American Musical." We really do. We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us - all of us. Thank you truly for seeing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds and orientations.

So you co-wrote this. That's my understanding. You co-wrote it with the director and the producer. Do I have that right?

MIRANDA: Yes, with Tommy and Jeffrey. We got the heads-up that he was coming that afternoon and sort of put that together before his arrival.

GROSS: OK, so what was the conversation like between you and whoever else was involved about whether you should say something or not?

MIRANDA: Well, the conversation was, this has been an incredibly divisive election with a lot of hurt feelings and disappointment and anger on both sides. And the overwhelming sort of statement within that statement is, we truly hope you lead all of us. We're a play that tells the story of our founders with a very diverse company that we feel, you know, reflects what our country looks like now. And so it was really intended as an olive branch. You know, please lead all of us. And I was - what I was really grateful for was that Sunday, Mike Pence really was grateful for that and I think got it in the sentiment in which it was intended. He said, I wasn't offended. I assure you that we are trying to lead all of you. And so I was grateful for his statements and for him stopping to listen. You know, he didn't have to do that, but he did. And I thought it felt like a civil dialogue between us.

BIANCULLI: Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer and lyricist of the Broadway musical "Hamilton," speaking to Terry Gross in 2017. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RATATAT'S "TACOBEL CANON")

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2017 interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, lyricist and original star of the musical "Hamilton." It's one of our staff picks for interviews of the decade.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

GROSS: So "Hamilton" is, in part, a story about an immigrant and - about immigrants and - which, of course, relates to your family background. Your father came to New York from Puerto Rico for college. And your mother...

MIRANDA: Technically making him not an immigrant because Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, but the experience of Spanish to English and displacement is very similar.

GROSS: Right. Exactly. And your mother, I think, moved as an infant to the U.S. from Puerto Rico.

MIRANDA: Correct.

GROSS: And you grew up in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. You went to, like, the Hunter College elementary and high school. Do I have that right?

MIRANDA: That's right.

GROSS: Yeah. So you've spoken in the past about this divide between who you were at home and in your Latino neighborhood and who you were at school with friends. What was the difference between those two yous?

MIRANDA: Oh, man. I feel like we've just stepped into Code Switch because that's what I was doing. I think that's sort of the interesting thing. I mean, I think if you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time, and that's a great way to make a writer. I won the lotto when I got into Hunter. To get a great, free public-school education sort of saved my family, and I was aware of it. I was aware of - that I was at a school with kids who were really smart.

And I also had friends in the neighborhood who went to the local school. And I remember feeling that drift happen. You know, when you spend your entire day with someone, your closer friends become the ones you go to school with. And yet, I'd still have sleepovers with the friends from the neighborhood, make movies with my friends from the neighborhood. And, you know, the corner of - that I lived in was, like, this little Latin American country. It's one in which the nanny who lived with us and raised us, who also raised my father in Puerto Rico, never needed to learn English. All of the business owners in and around our block all spoke Spanish.

And yet I'd go to school, and I'd be at my friends' houses on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and I'd be the one translating to the nanny who spoke Spanish. So it's interesting to become a Latino cultural ambassador when you're 7, you know what I mean? (Laughter) So I had that experience as well. So, you know, we changed depending on the room we're in. I'm talking quieter because I'm talking to Terry Gross.

GROSS: (Laughter) So you obviously, you know, love rap and hip-hop. What were the first recordings that made a big impression - the first rap recordings that made a big impression on you?

MIRANDA: I have several. I remember my sister bringing home The Fat Boys when I was really little and also taking me to the first hip-hop movies. I remember going to see "Beat Street" and going to see "Breakin'" as a really little kid being sort of dragged along by my older sister. My sister is as responsible for anyone for giving me good taste in music. I remember stealing her copy of Black Sheep's "A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing" and learning (rapping) engine, engine No. 9 on the New York transit line.

I think that's probably the first rap song I really worked hard to memorize in sixth grade. But then also, you know, Naughty By Nature and Queen Latifah - the music you love when you're a teenager is always going to be the most important to you. And I find that it's all over the score of "Hamilton." The quotes are Biggie quotes. They're a big pun, and these are all New York East Coast '90s rappers. And that's when I was a teenager.

GROSS: So I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to do one the first rhymes that you remember writing that you still remember today.

MIRANDA: (Rapping) Well, hello, my name is Lin. But if you're dyslexic, call me Nil. My rhymes are going to kill, so I suggest you write your will and leave your [expletive] to me. I am the epitome of coolness, can't be rid of me because I will be hitting the mic tonight.

GROSS: (Laughter).

MIRANDA: Notice my voice went up about two octaves. It's because at that time, I was listening to nothing but the Pharcyde. And my favorite rapper in the Pharcyde had that (rapping in high-pitched voice) well, there she goes again, the dopest Ethiopian, and now the world around me - it was that cadence, and I think my rapper voice is still influenced by Pharcyde. But that is - those lines were a rhyme I wrote in ninth grade that I showed to friends. And they were like, all right, stick to your day job (laughter).

GROSS: Oh, come on. That was pretty good. That was funny (laughter).

MIRANDA: Yeah.

GROSS: So your father has or had a political consulting company. He worked with New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

MIRANDA: He has.

GROSS: He still has it - and advising him on Latino affairs. And you apparently wrote jingles when you were younger for this political consulting company that your father owns. How old were you when you started writing them? And please sing one for us.

MIRANDA: Well, jingles is misleading because it sounds like a, oh, how I wait to wake up in the morning. It's not - they're not like "I Like Ike." They - it's background music for commercials. I was basically cheap labor for my dad. He would say, I need 30 seconds of some jazz for a Sharpton spot that's going to be on WBLS. Or I need some bright salsa for a Fernando Ferrer campaign commercial. You know, I wrote music for Eliot Spitzer before we knew what we knew...

GROSS: (Laughter).

MIRANDA: ...When he was running for governor. And whatever Democrat was running or my dad was working with, I was writing the campaign music. I liked writing the negative ads more than the - because it's more minor chords. You just kind of hit the synthesizer (imitating synthesizer). Politician X voted against da da da (ph), and then it ends with bright salsa - (imitating salsa music). Vote politician Y.

GROSS: So you know how you were talking about the compartmentalized you, the you you were when you were at home and in your Latino neighborhood and the you you were at school when your friends were white and not Latino and that you learned, finally, to bring all those parts together? Was the same kind of compartmentalization happening for you musically? You loved Broadway shows, and you loved hip-hop.

MIRANDA: That's a fantastic question.

GROSS: And it's maybe hard to find people who, when they're teens, love both.

MIRANDA: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. And honestly, what a fantastic question because theater is really the thing that began to break that divide for me. My senior year in high school, I was the director of the school musical, and I picked "West Side Story," painfully aware that there were not enough Latino kids to play all the Sharks in "West Side Story" at Hunter or at least audition. And so what that became for me was actually this kind of weird way of bringing my culture to school. I remember being knocked out when I first saw the movie in sixth grade that there's actually a musical number in the canon about whether you should stay in Puerto Rico and live in the United States.

GROSS: Oh, yeah.

MIRANDA: You know, that's amazing when you're 12, and you grow up in New York and your family's all from this other island - to have that conversation happening in front of you in an iconic musical. And so I had my white and Asian Sharks. And I brought my dad in, and he did dialect coaching. You know, while they're singing "America," I want the things they're yelling while they're cheering each other on to be accurate. I want the accents to be accurate.

BIANCULLI: Our guest is Lin-Manuel Miranda, original star of the Broadway musical "Hamilton," who wrote the show's music, lyrics and book. He spoke with Terry Gross in 2017. And after a break, we'll continue their conversation. We'll also hear another of our staff's picks for interviews of the decade by revisiting Terry's 2011 interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of "The Book Of Mormon." I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YORKTOWN (THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN)")

DAVEED DIGGS: (As Lafayette, singing) Monsieur Hamilton...

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton, singing) Monsieur Lafayette...

DIGGS: (As Lafayette, singing) In command where you belong.

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton, singing) How you say no sweat? We're finally on the field. We've had quite a run.

DIGGS: (As Lafayette) Immigrants.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA AND DAVEED DIGGS: (As Hamilton and Lafayette) We get the job done.

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton) So what happens if we win?

DIGGS: (As Lafayette, singing) I go back to France. I bring freedom to my people if I'm given the chance.

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton) We'll be with you when you do.

DIGGS: (As Lafayette) Go. Lead your men.

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton, singing) I'll see you on the other side.

DIGGS: (As Lafayette, singing) 'Til we meet again. Let's go.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters, singing) I am not throwin' away my shot. I am not throwin' away my shot. Hey yo, I'm just like my country. I'm young, scrappy and hungry. And I'm not throwin' away my shot. I am not throwin' away my shot.

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton, singing) Til' the world turns upside down.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters) Till the world turns upside down.

MIRANDA: (As Hamilton, rapping) I imagine death so much, it feels more like a memory. This is where it gets me - on my feet, the enemy ahead of me. If this is the end of me, at least I have a friend with me, weapon in my hand, a command and my men with me. Then I remember my Eliza's expecting me. Not only that - my Eliza's expecting. We got to go, got to get the job done...

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross back with more of Terry's 2017 interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of "Hamilton." The Broadway hip-hop musical about the Founding Fathers won 11 Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. This interview is one of our staff picks for interview of the decade.

GROSS: So I have to ask you about Stephen Sondheim because you have a very interesting history with him. First of all, when you were directing "West Side Story" in high school, he came to your class because he was the friend of the father of one of the students in the cast and...

MIRANDA: Yes. He was...

GROSS: ...Spoke to you. So you got...

MIRANDA: Yeah. He's - John Weidman's daughter...

GROSS: Oh.

MIRANDA: ...Went to our school.

GROSS: He wrote the book for "Assassins" and "Pacific Overtures."

MIRANDA: "Pacific Overtures," yes.

GROSS: Yeah. OK, so there's that. So you get to meet him in high school, and then you get to write the Spanish lyrics for the Spanish production of "West Side Story."

MIRANDA: Right.

GROSS: And then you got to be in a production of "Merrily We Roll Along," which is a great Sondheim musical that always needs to be revived because the original Broadway run was so very short. And so this was a City Center - a New York City Center Encores! production. In fact, I want to play just a little bit of you in that, which...

MIRANDA: Oh, great.

GROSS: Encores! was gracious enough to - I saw you in this production. So you're playing a lyricist who works with a composer, but the composer has kind of, like, sold out. And, you know, he's just doing, like, commercial work, and the lyricist now has come to think of the composer - instead of just being his friend and collaborator Franklin Shepard, he thinks of him now as, like, Franklin Shepard, Inc. because he's...

MIRANDA: Right.

GROSS: ...So much about, like, deals and making money. In this scene, like, you're getting interviewed on TV. You're just kind of pretty bitter about the whole collaboration with this composer.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Now, how do you two work together?

COLIN DONNELL: (As Frank Shepard) Oh, we work...

MIRANDA: (As Charley) Oh, may I answer that?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Please.

MIRANDA: (As Charley) How do we work together? Sure. He goes...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) And I go...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley, singing) And soon we're humming along, and that's called writing a song. Then he goes...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley, singing) And I go...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) And the phone goes d-d-d-d-ring (ph). And he goes, mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter. Yes, Jerome. Mutter - no, Jerome. Mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter - that's his lawyer, Jerome. Mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter - do it, Jerome - click. Sorry, Charley.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley, singing) So I go...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley, singing) And he goes...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley, singing) And I go...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MIRANDA: (As Charley, singing) And soon we're tapping away.

(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) Sorry, Charley.

(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) It's the secretary...

(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) ...On the intercom. Yes, Miss Bzzz? It's a messenger. Thanks, Miss Bzzz. Will you tell him to wait? Will you order the car? Will you call up the bank? Will you wire the coast? Will you - d-d-d-d-ring (ph). Sorry, Charley. Mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter - sell the stock. Mutter - buy the rights. Mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter...

(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) Let me put you on hold.

(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER)

MIRANDA: (As Charley) Yes, Miss Bzzz? It's the interview. Thanks, Miss Bzzz. Will you tell him to wait? Will you wire the car? Will you order the coast? Will you send up the bank?

(Singing) And the telephones blink, and the stocks get sold. And the rest of us, he keeps on hold. And he's into making movies, and he's now a corporation, right? So I play at home with my wife and kids, and I wait to hear the movie bids. And I've got a little sailboat, and I'm into meditation, right? He flies off to California. I discuss him with my shrink. That's the story of the way we work, me and Franklin Shepard, Inc.

(Laughter) I'm surprised at how much I like this.

GROSS: OK. That's my guest Lin-Manuel Miranda. You're so much fun in that, and I really think doing hip-hop rhymes is great preparation for that lyric.

MIRANDA: Absolutely it is.

GROSS: For singing that, yeah. And Sondheim has written so many - he's just, like, the most brilliant lyricist. But what are some of the things you feel you learned either from talking with Sondheim - because I know he also gave you feedback on "Hamilton" before you actually put it on stage. So what are things you've learned from actually talking to him or just from, like, getting intimately acquainted with his work?

MIRANDA: The thing he always sort of stressed was variety, variety, variety, variety, variety. When you're dealing with a constant rhythm, no matter how great your lyrics are, if you don't switch it up, people's heads are going to start bobbing, and they're going to stop listening to what you're saying. So consistently keep the ear fresh, and keep the audience surprised. And, you know, that was his sort of watchword throughout the writing of "Hamilton."

GROSS: The Sondheim song that's closest to comic rap is, in my opinion, "Not Getting Married," which is done...

MIRANDA: Is everybody here? Because if everybody's here, I'd like to thank you all for coming to the wedding.

GROSS: Yeah. Do more. Do more.

MIRANDA: I'd appreciate your going even more. I mean, you must have lots of better things to do. And not a word of it to Paul. Remember Paul - you know, the man I'm going to marry? But I'm not because I'd never ruin anyone as wonderful as he is. Thank you all for the gifts and the flowers. Thanks, you all, for the card and the showers. Don't tell Paul, but I'm not getting married today.

GROSS: Anyone who could do that song has an incredible tongue (laughter).

MIRANDA: Absolutely.

GROSS: It's so tricky. It's so fast. And the words are so just kind of, like, dense and funny and rhyme-y (ph). And so have you thought about that song a lot in terms of intricate rhyme schemes and what the...

MIRANDA: Well, I think about...

GROSS: ...Human voice is capable of without totally tripping up?

MIRANDA: Honestly, I think about that song more when people ask me, how did you think rap was going to work on Broadway? And I go, nothing in my show is faster than "Getting Married Today" in "Company."

GROSS: Yeah.

MIRANDA: So I don't know what you're talking about. There's so much precedent for the work in both quote-unquote "hip-hop" and not in terms of patter for the stage. But, you know, what's amazing about "Getting Married Today" is it's also a masterclass in making a lyric easy. There are consonants on which you waste air. H - there's no H's in that because if you say huh (ph), you've lost half the air in your lungs. So it's very T's and P's.

Thank you all. Is everybody here? Because if everybody's here, I'd like to thank you all for coming to the wedding.

It's more about breath control than being - it's not a tongue twister. It's very consciously not a tongue twister. It's about being able to say it in one continuous breath and getting out of the way and choosing words that do not require any extra air or any extra tongue or jaw work. So it's actually not about trying to make it hard. It's about making it easy.

GROSS: So did you learn that intuitively, or did Sondheim tell you that that was his intention - to stay away from as many H's as possible and to keep it to things that could easily be said?

MIRANDA: I think I read about that in a conversation he had at some point, but I also knew that intuitively because of the hip-hop artists I liked who rapped fast. You know, they're not trying to make something that's hard for them to perform every night. They're trying to make something that sounds impressive and is a joy to deliver. Trying to think of, like, a really specific early '90s example - Queen Latifah. (Rapping) Snatch your stature. You're broken - looks more like a fracture. Catch that rapper. Latifah will be back to crush you.

That's Queen Latifah in 1992, and it's fast. There's Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." She goes, (rapping) there's plenty of people out there with triggers ready to pull it. Why you trying to jump in front of the bullet, young lady?

No H's - so you learn intuitively that, like, the writer is trying to make something that flows easily off the tongue.

GROSS: So did the writer of "Alexander Hamilton" (ph) try to avoid H's in writing the lyrics? (Laughter).

MIRANDA: Well, you will observe that "Hamilton" is not in any of the fast rapping that happens on stage, right? It's - George Washington goes, Hamilton, and then Jefferson is the one who goes, so he knows what to do in a trench, ingenuitive (ph) and fluent in French, I mean - so we're not hampering anyone with Hamilton.

GROSS: (Laughter) Well, Lin-Manuel Miranda, it's just been wonderful to talk with you. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you so very much.

MIRANDA: Likewise. The joy is mine.

GROSS: Lin-Manuel Miranda is the creator and original star of the hit musical "Hamilton." Terry Gross interviewed him in 2017. Next up, we'll hear from the writers of "The Book Of Mormon," another hit musical of the decade, as our staff picks of favorite interviews from the decade continues. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Fresh Air' Favorites: 'Hamilton' Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda

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This week, we're listening back to some favorite Fresh Air interviews from the past decade. Terry Gross spoke to Miranda in 2017 about how his "mixed tape" musical came together. DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross.

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If you listen to StoryCorps on NPR's Morning Edition each week, you may recognize the voice of Dr. William Lynn Weaver (who goes by Lynn). He's shared lots of stories with us over the years - about growing up in the Civil Rights era-South , a memorable Christmas , the importance of family - but there was always one story that felt like it existed at the heart of the rest.

In the fall of 1964, Lynn, along with more than a dozen other black students, were among the first to integrate West High School - a previously all-white high school - in Knoxville, Tennessee. Although there were bright spots - former teachers who became mentors, classmates who became brothers - the racism Lynn encountered inside and outside the classroom left many scars. " I have PTSD from West High School," said Lynn, who had never even driven past the high school since graduating in '67.

But in 2017, someone from West's present reunited Lynn with his past. And on this episode, part one of Lynn's journey back to a place he thought he'd never step foot inside again.

Top photo: Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Middle photo: Dr. William Lynn Weaver in Fayetteville, NC. By Jud Esty-Kendall for StoryCorps.

Bottom photo: Dr. William Lynn Weaver as a member of the West High School Rebels during his senior year. From the 1967 West High School Yearbook.
Released on November 27, 2018.
Like the music in this episode? Support the artists:

"We're from far and near" and "Hollow & Ghosts (feat. Francois Creutzer)" by Ending Satellites from the album And so sing the black birds

"Untitled #7" by Yusuke Tsutsumi from the album Birds Flying in the Dark

"The Last Florida Panther" and "The Pediment" by Fabian Almazan and Linda Oh

"The Gold Lining" by Broke For Free from the album Gold Can Stay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you listen to StoryCorps on NPR's Morning Edition each week, you may recognize the voice of Dr. William Lynn Weaver (who goes by Lynn). He's shared lots of stories with us over the years - about growing up in the Civil Rights era-South , a memorable Christmas , the importance of family - but there was always one story that felt like it existed at the heart of the rest.