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When the Internet offers a superabundance of material to read, watch, listen to and play, it's easy to skim over text and half-listen to broadcasts. But the British government is inviting schoolchildren to put down their cellphones, turn off their news feeds and spend a long time lingering over a poem — so long that they learn it by heart.

The United Kingdom's Department for Education is funding a nationwide poetry-reciting contest called Poetry By Heart, similar in structure to Poetry Out Loud in the U.S. and other poetry competitions in Canada and Ireland. The contest, at the county level, requires students to memorize two poems from a list of 130 choices and recite the poems by heart in a series of competitions.

English poet Jean Sprackland helped select the poems at the heart of the contest. She joins NPR's Scott Simon to discuss the pleasures of poetry memorization.

Neil Jordan is best known as a filmmaker — he directed The Crying Game, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire and the Showtime series The Borgias — but he began his career as a writer. His first novel, The Past, was published in Ireland in 1980 to great acclaim.

The novel follows an enigmatic protagonist on his search for his family's secrets in a Cornish seaside town. Jordan joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about The Past, which has been reissued in the United States by Soft Skull Press.

Take just a moment to estimate how many songs you know by heart. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

Now... how many poems do you have memorized?

For most modern readers, even poetry fans, that number's pretty low. But Poetry By Heart, a new competition in the U.K., is seeking to bring the art of poetry memorization to a new generation.

On Weekend Edition Saturday, poet Jean Sprackland — who helped assemble the list of 130 poems eligible for Poetry By Heart — spoke to NPR's Scott Simon about the joys of memorization. As it turns out, both Sprackland and Simon still remember texts they learned years ago: for Sprackland, it's John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"; for Simon, it's Macbeth's last soliloquy.

Sprackland says that a poem known by heart becomes a part of you, and "it's something that lives with you forever." For some, that might stay true even if you lose a few of the words: in 2005, linguist Geoff Nunberg commented on Fresh Air that he still feels like he "owns" poems that he can't perfectly recite. But if a memorized poem stays with you forever, then learning a text comes with some pressure. Let's say you want to up the number of poems you know by heart.... how do you choose which works to carry with you for the rest of your life?

Some poems, marked by regular rhymes and rhythms, are simply easier to memorize. After all, the predictable patterns of verse are the reason why poems are usually easier to learn by heart than prose. But it's not all about picking the easiest poem to learn; you'll want one with emotional impact, rich imagery and enough shades of meaning that it's worth returning to again and again. And then there's always the question of fame: while an obscure text might be of great personal significance, learning a poem that's more famous can make for a pretty good party trick.

The 10 poems below, selected from the 130 in the Poetry By Heart anthology, are particularly rewarding to memorize. But while this list is a good place to start, ultimately the decision is entirely personal. When a poem hits you right in the gut, you'll know it's time to start memorizing.

Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats

Jean Sprackland told NPR's Scott Simon that even before she knew what they meant, she loved how Keats' words "tasted and felt."

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!

Paradise Lost, Book 1, 242-270, John Milton

Satan's response to his expulsion from heaven, in its fury and arrogance, is recognizably more human than demonic.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This famously drug-fueled dreamscape manages to be simultaneously haunting and energetic.

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelly

Easy to memorize and fun to recite, this classic sonnet is great to have on hand as a rejoinder to the over-confident.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold

In a poem perfect for today's apocalypse-obsessed, Arnold mixes despair and last-ditch hope.

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

Invitation to Love, Paul Dunbar

Dunbar's love poem shines with sincerity, and features repetition that translates well to speech and memory.

Come to my heart and bring it to rest

The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

This classic reads like a horror story, but there's a powerful moral judgment behind the bloody monsters.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The Fish, Elizabeth Bishop

Deceptively simple, this description of a catch builds towards a euphoric release.

And everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

Sea Canes, Derek Walcott

Once memorized, this brief, lovely elegy becomes a constantly-accessible comfort for the mourning.

but out of what is lost grows something stronger

, Rita Dove

From a single word of Swedish, Dove builds a meditation on change and the power of language.

You start out with one thing, end
up with another

What works would you recommend to someone looking for the perfect poem to memorize?

Where does the phrase "the whole nine yards" come from? In 1982, William Safire called that "one of the great etymological mysteries of our time."

He thought the phrase originally referred to the capacity of a cement truck in cubic yards. But there are plenty of other theories.

Some people say it dates back to when square-riggers had three masts, each with three yards supporting the sails, so the whole nine yards meant the sails were fully set.

Another popular story holds that it refers to the length of an ammunition belt on World War II fighters — when a pilot had exhausted his ammunition, he said he had shot off the whole nine yards. Or it was the amount of cloth in the queen's bridal train, or in the Shroud of Turin. Or it had to do with a fourth-down play in football. Or it came from a joke about a prodigiously well-endowed Scotsman who gets his kilt caught in a door.

The Internet is full of just-so stories like these. They're often shaky in their facts about ammunition belts or cement trucks, but they come with assurances that the information came firsthand from an old Naval gunnery instructor or a Scottish tailor.

It used to be hard to debunk these tales, since the only way to track the expressions down was by rooting around in library stacks and newspaper morgues in search of a revealing early citation. But with the vast historical collections of books and newspapers that are now online, etymology has joined the list of activities you can do in your pajamas.

Word-sleuths traced the modern use of "the whole nine yards" as far back as a 1956 article in a magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground. Now they've discovered an even earlier version of the phrase, "the whole six yards," which was used in the rural South as early as 1912. That's still how the phrase goes in parts of the South, but it was inflated to "nine yards" when it caught on elsewhere, the same way the early 20th-century "cloud seven" was upgraded to our "cloud nine."

The unearthing of those early sources was deemed important enough to warrant a story in The New York Times, not an organ that ordinarily treats etymological discoveries as breaking news. True, the findings don't actually settle what if anything the phrase originally referred to. But they put the kibosh on the stories about World War II and the one about cement trucks, which hadn't been invented yet — though, actually, none of these stories was very plausible in the first place. `

Of course there could be a real story behind the expression, even if it's no more than a family joke about the long scarves that Aunt Florence used to knit as Christmas presents. But it could also be that somebody just plucked the words out of the air one Tuesday morning. One way or the other, the real birth of the expression was when somebody passed it along without caring what "nine yards" referred to.

The fact is that once you've said "the whole" it doesn't matter what words you finish it with or whether they mean anything or not — shooting match, enchilada, schmear, shebang? "The whole ball of wax" first showed up in the 1880s, though some writers say it comes from a 16th-century ritual for dividing up an estate among heirs. If you believe that, I've got a caboodle I want to sell you.

A number of years ago I started saying "the whole kazonga," just because I liked the sound of it. Nobody ever called me on it, but when I finally looked it up it turned out to be the name both of an Italian adult comic book and of a Zambian minister who was involved in a fertilizer scam. In the somewhat unlikely event that "the whole kazonga" ever catches on, you can be sure someone will explain how it originally comes from one or the other of those.

Still, it's hard to accept that it doesn't matter where the expression came from. Whether the measure is six yards or nine, it has a tantalizing specificity. It cries out for an explanation, and there are plenty of them at hand. Is it merely coincidence that six yards is the exact diameter of a pitcher's mound? The amount of cloth in a Varanasi sari? The length of a parachute line?

But that profusion of possibilities is the key to the idiom's appeal. If "the whole nine yards" had a definitive completion — if it went on to mention yards of cloth, cement or ammunition — it would never have caught on in the first place. It's like a line of poetry; it resonates without resolving.

Except that we don't think of this as poetry. A poet's images can bubble straight up out of the imagination; we don't ask for explanations or backstories. Would it really help to know where Gertrude Stein got "pigeons in the grass, alas" from? "Let me see, that was the day when Miss Stein and I were walking in the Luxembourg Gardens, and I started to sit on the lawn but she said, 'No, Alice' ... "

But that's just the kind of story we expect when the phrase originates in the collective imagination. So we rummage around in old ships and cement trucks looking for a secret key, as if there couldn't be any poetry in everyday language that didn't begin its life as prose.

Just when we were patting ourselves on the back for eluding the end of the world and avoiding the fiscal cliff, the folks at The Edge have let loose a flood of new things to worry about.

Every year Edge.org poses an Annual Question to dozens of scholars, scientists, writers, artists and thinkers. The respondents this year include the reasonably famous, such as Arianna Huffington, Steven Pinker, Brian Eno, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and 13.7's own Stuart Kauffman, as well as the not so famous (like me).

The 2013 question is: "What should we be worried about?" Respondents were urged to raise worries that aren't already on the public radar, or to dispel those that are.

The answers, released just this weekend, fall into a few common themes. Many worried about the impact of technology on individual minds and human relationships. My own entry was among them, raising the concern that fast and efficient access to information isn't always better access to information. Thanks to features of human psychology, effortless information retrieval can engender illusions of knowledge and understanding. Others had related concerns:

... ours is an age of information glut, not deep knowledge. Noga Arikha, historian and author at the Paris College of Art

In Amsterdam, a popular street snack of brined herring comes with chopped onions and a side of sour pickle. The history of Dutch trade, too, is buried under those onions.

The salt used in preserving both the herring and the pickles enabled sea travel for hundreds of years. The salt trade is credited with building a foundation upon which the Dutch consolidated wealth and power in the 16th century. Dominating the seas for over three hundred years, they were able to establish colonies in tropical climates to monopolize the valuable spice trade. As we reported before, the Dutch went to some extreme lengths to control the Indonesian islands where nutmeg was discovered.

Spices flavor many of the foods served in the Netherlands, especially in baking, but they scent the savories, too, like pickles, from one end of the former Dutch empire to the other.

One of the best known pickles for the famous multi-course rijsttafel, a bountiful spectacle developed by Dutch-Indonesians to display their comestible power, is atjar tjampoer, mixed pickles of shredded vegetables. It's typically seasoned with sambal oelek, Indonesia's ubiquitous spicy pepper sauce, as well as ginger, turmeric, vinegar, and sugar.

Karin Vaneker, a Dutch food scholar and author, points out that atjar tjampoer have a decidedly colonial makeup. "If you look at the ingredients," she says, "several aren't Indonesian but Dutch. Vegetables like spitskool [a pointy-headed] cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower probably would not grow well in Indonesia. In general, colonizers weren't interested in developing local agriculture, and [immigrants] likely tried to cultivate European crops."

A Colorful Jumble of Dutch-Surinamese Culture

Lined up on the shelf at Surinaams Buffet Catering in Amsterdam is a vivid display of the byproducts of Amsterdam's colonial past. A beribboned bottle of spiked punch cream and very European brandied plums flank jars of onions with a cucumber-like tree fruit called birambi, and mixed vegetable pickles of shredded carrots, pearl onions, cauliflower, red peppers, gherkins, and baby corn.

Caterer Mavis Hofwijk, originally from Paramaribo, Surinam, immigrated to Amsterdam in the 1960s. From a family of pastry chefs, Hofwijk cooks for visiting dignitaries, most recently Kofi Annan and Princess Maxima of the Netherlands.

Her pickles are soused in a big plastic tub. Bay leaves float lazily around the top of a murky brew fragrant with allspice, clove, coriander, onion, celery sticks, smashed whole ginger, and spicy pepper. Hofwijk stresses certain principles in her cooking, ones illustrated nicely by her pickles: "the best food needs balance," she says, "sweet, sour, and salt."

The very Surinamese souse marries well to many kinds of vegetables, including ones the Dutch love: beets and onions.

Jewish Pickle Carts And Famous Art

Dutch trade routes were not always long journeys by sea. Hofwijk's Surinamese flavors may lend an exotic flavor to Dutch cuisine, but they also share a kinship with the Jewish immigrants who circled Amsterdam with their pickle carts. Fourth generation pickle purveyor Fred Ooms has a cozy little shop in Amsterdam that he runs with wife Monique, but recalls the hard life of the previous generations.

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A masked assailant threw acid into the face of the Bolshoi ballet's artistic director on Thursday in Moscow in what may have been a "reprisal for his selection of dancers in starring roles at the famed Russian company," The Associated Press reports.

Russia Today writes that 42-year-old Sergei Filin "may lose his sight." He "suffered severe burns of multiple degrees to his face and eyes," it adds. And, the news outlet reports that:

"It will take Filin at least six months to recover, Bolshoi spokesperson Ekaterina Novikova said. She added that Sergei Filin had received threats from anonymous callers before. 'We never imagined that a war for roles — not for real estate or for oil — could reach this level of crime,' Novikova said to Channel One.

"Bolshoi general director Anatoly Iksanov said he believed the attack was linked to Filin's work at the theater. 'He is a man of principle and never compromised," Iksanov said. 'If he believed that this or that dancer was not ready or was unable to perform this or that part, he would turn them down.' "

Get recipes for Barley Risotto With Mushrooms, Manchego And Thyme, Mom's Beef And Barley Soup, Pearled Barley Salad With Apples, Pomegranate Seeds And Pine Nuts (above), Curried Barley And Quinoa Cakes and Warm Barley Salad.

We're in Tanzania on safari, when two stately looking giraffes walk into view, looking thoughtful, gentle, as giraffes do, and all of a sudden one of them drops way low and swings his whole neck and head into his buddy's legs, hard, so hard the other giraffe gives off a little cry and then, wham, slams him back, and then the two of them are slamming, parting, clinging, pushing (Are they comparing necks? Looks that way ... ) just like boxers. It doesn't seem like either gets hurt, but wow! I didn't know giraffes do this. I looked it up. It's called "necking."

For a little while, two scientists got a lot of attention when they proposed that these fights were the main reason giraffes have long necks. In a 1996 study, zoologists Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers challenged the traditional explanation that giraffes born with longer necks could better feed themselves and therefore reproduce more successfully. There are other ways to evolve long necks, they said, proposing what has become known as the "Necks for Sex" theory.

Necks For Sex

Simmons and Scheepers claimed the giraffes in the wild don't do that much reaching for food in high places. They find most of their meals lower down, nearer the ground. Combat, they felt, was a better way to predict which giraffes passed their genes into the future. The stronger, bigger-necked males, they believed, would mate more often, producing more and more bigger-necked baby giraffes. Females would develop long necks as a side effect, and if this went on long enough, then, Thock! Bam! Clump! You get a modern giraffe.

Necks for Sex sounds like a plausible explainer, but according to Brian Switek (who is the reason I'm writing this story; he's fascinated by big animals, and I devour his blog Laelaps), it now seems Necks for Sex may be wrong.

Brian wrote how a second group of scientists went back into the field, took another look, and found that giraffes in the wild do indeed eat food that's high up (and sometimes low down), and long necks do give individuals a feeding advantage. And now this month there's a new paper by much the same group that says it's likely these necking bouts are not always related to copulation, sometimes it's just a king-of-the-mountain thing, and that "males with the longest and most massive necks don't always win these contests."

Ah, well. I don't mind that these neck slams may not be evolutionarily important, that they're more like prize fights, what feisty young giraffes do when they're feeling strong and combative. But it's extra-nice to know that not infrequently, the bruiser loses, and the skinny guy wins.

A presidential inauguration is an event defined by huge, sweeping optics: The National Mall full of cheering Americans; a grandiose platform in front of the Capitol building; the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. And at the centerpiece: a speech.

On Monday, President Obama will give his second inaugural address — and he faces a challenge in crafting a speech for this moment.

The last time Obama gave an inaugural address, millions of joyous people tuned in around the world, ready to be inspired by a man who rose to prominence on the incredible power of his words. The president knew that the American economy was teetering on the brink of disaster.

And four years later, the verdict on that address is pretty unanimous from former White House speechwriters of both parties:

Speechwriter Mary Kate Cary, who wrote for President George H.W. Bush: "I think most people would have a hard time quoting you a line back from it. ... It just seems like there were a lot of platitudes."

Jeff Shesol, who wrote for President Bill Clinton: "There really aren't very many lines in President Obama's first inaugural address that stood out even in the moment. ... It didn't have an animating idea. It didn't have a clear theme."

George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell: "I had to go back and look at Obama's inaugural address to really remember lines that I had at the time paused over."

Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman: "There's the old adage: You only get one chance to make a first impression. And I think President Obama might hope that's not true."

They all know firsthand that one of the toughest speeches to write for any president is also one of the most high-profile addresses he'll give. They generally agree that the closest thing Obama had to a standout line four years ago was not even an original: "In the words of scripture: The time has come to set aside childish things."

It's All Politics

Inauguration Mashup: The Speech In 11 Easy Steps

In a move that could head off another bruising battle over increasing the nation's debt ceiling, GOP leaders in the House plan to approve a three-month increase in the nation's borrowing authority next week, NPR's S.V. Date reports.

But, he tells our Newscast Desk, Republicans want to tie a longer-term increase to the passage of a budget that cuts spending.

His report continues:

"The plan comes from Majority Leader Eric Cantor as House Republicans wrap up a retreat in Southern Virginia.

"Cantor writes that the three-month extension would give time for the Senate to pass a budget, which it hasn't done in four years. Further, if Congress fails to pass a budget, House members and senators would not get paid until they did.

"President Obama has insisted on a longer-term increase in the borrowing authority because short-term increases would be disruptive to the financial markets.

"It's not yet clear how the Democratic-controlled Senate would react to a three-month increase. The Treasury has projected it will be unable to pay the nation's bills as early as mid-February unless something is done."

President Obama's proposed renewal of a ban on assault-style weapons is expected to be based on the legislation approved by Congress in 1994 that expired 10 years later.

But when the first assault weapons ban was approved — outlawing 19 specific weapons — it was a very different time, and Congress was a very different place.

Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, and the nation's crime rate was a major concern. The assault weapons ban was part of an extensive crime bill that included money to hire additional police, build new prisons and fund crime prevention programs.

President Clinton made the bill a top priority of his first term.

"The American people have waited long enough," he said. "We don't need to waste their time with frivolous or political amendments and delay. We don't need to take months on a task that can be done in a couple of weeks."

Then as now, Vice President Biden played a central role in the debate. In 1994, Biden, then a senator from Delaware, strongly argued in favor of banning assault-style weapons. "In case after case of murderous rampages by disturbed and violent thugs, the ability of military-style assault weapons to kill and maim not just a few but eight or 10, 14, 35 people in just minutes has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt," he said.

In 1994, former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman was Biden's chief of staff and, as such, a key player in negotiations that led to passage of the crime bill. He says he's not sure much that happened then applies nearly 20 years later.

"I think it was a very different time in 1994. I don't think there's very many lessons to learn from that," he says. "This was a very small part of a much bigger bill and people were really interested in dong something about crime. I think right now this bill is going to have to be standalone. It's going to be much more difficult than 1994."

Not that it was easy in 1994. As Paul McNulty remembers it, that August — a time when lawmakers would normally have been on their summer recess — was filled with meetings and late-night bargaining.

McNulty, who went on to become deputy attorney general and is now in private practice, was then working as a House Republican staffer. He says the crime bill nearly died on a procedural vote.

"The gun control issue was the top issue that had stirred up a lot of controversy at that point," he says.

Lawmakers argued over how to define the ban, and which specific weapons and features it would apply to. They eventually settled on a list of 19 guns and agreed to sunset the law entirely in 10 years. Those concessions were necessary to win support for the ban.

Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now: In 1994, there were House Republicans who backed the crime bill.

"There were a group of Republicans, approximately 40 or so, who represented more moderate districts, districts in the North, Midwest, where they weren't in complete opposition to an assault weapon ban," McNulty says.

In fact, 46 House Republicans voted for the 1994 assault weapons ban — a total that's unimaginable now.

In the November election later that year, Republicans won control of Congress, which some have attributed to Democratic support for the crime bill. While that's a matter of debate, it's clear that Congress has had little appetite for gun control measures since then — a dynamic President Obama hopes will have been changed by the Newtown, Conn., school shootings.

"In 1968, Apollo 8 went to the Moon," starts writer Frank White, who coined the expression "Overview Effect" to describe the deep changes that astronauts experience once they see Earth from space. "They didn't land but they did circle the Moon; I was watching it on television and at a certain point one of the astronauts casually said: we are going to turn the camera around and show you the Earth. And he did. And that was the first time I had ever seen the planet hanging in space like that. And it was profound," he continued. A recent short documentary, Overview, collects statements from many astronauts who have had this unique experience.

It is a breathtaking video, and one with a very strong message for our collective future.

Just when we were patting ourselves on the back for eluding the end of the world and avoiding the fiscal cliff, the folks at The Edge have let loose a flood of new things to worry about.

Every year Edge.org poses an Annual Question to dozens of scholars, scientists, writers, artists and thinkers. The respondents this year include the reasonably famous, such as Arianna Huffington, Steven Pinker, Brian Eno, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and 13.7's own Stuart Kauffman, as well as the not so famous (like me).

The 2013 question is: "What should we be worried about?" Respondents were urged to raise worries that aren't already on the public radar, or to dispel those that are.

The answers, released just this weekend, fall into a few common themes. Many worried about the impact of technology on individual minds and human relationships. My own entry was among them, raising the concern that fast and efficient access to information isn't always better access to information. Thanks to features of human psychology, effortless information retrieval can engender illusions of knowledge and understanding. Others had related concerns:

... ours is an age of information glut, not deep knowledge. Noga Arikha, historian and author at the Paris College of Art

Where does the phrase "the whole nine yards" come from? In 1982, William Safire called that "one of the great etymological mysteries of our time."

He thought the phrase originally referred to the capacity of a cement truck in cubic yards. But there are plenty of other theories.

Some people say it dates back to when square-riggers had three masts, each with three yards supporting the sails, so the whole nine yards meant the sails were fully set.

Another popular story holds that it refers to the length of an ammunition belt on World War II fighters — when a pilot had exhausted his ammunition, he said he had shot off the whole nine yards. Or it was the amount of cloth in the queen's bridal train, or in the Shroud of Turin. Or it had to do with a fourth-down play in football. Or it came from a joke about a prodigiously well-endowed Scotsman who gets his kilt caught in a door.

The Internet is full of just-so stories like these. They're often shaky in their facts about ammunition belts or cement trucks, but they come with assurances that the information came firsthand from an old Naval gunnery instructor or a Scottish tailor.

It used to be hard to debunk these tales, since the only way to track the expressions down was by rooting around in library stacks and newspaper morgues in search of a revealing early citation. But with the vast historical collections of books and newspapers that are now online, etymology has joined the list of activities you can do in your pajamas.

Word-sleuths traced the modern use of "the whole nine yards" as far back as a 1956 article in a magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground. Now they've discovered an even earlier version of the phrase, "the whole six yards," which was used in the rural South as early as 1912. That's still how the phrase goes in parts of the South, but it was inflated to "nine yards" when it caught on elsewhere, the same way the early 20th-century "cloud seven" was upgraded to our "cloud nine."

The unearthing of those early sources was deemed important enough to warrant a story in The New York Times, not an organ that ordinarily treats etymological discoveries as breaking news. True, the findings don't actually settle what if anything the phrase originally referred to. But they put the kibosh on the stories about World War II and the one about cement trucks, which hadn't been invented yet — though, actually, none of these stories was very plausible in the first place. `

Of course there could be a real story behind the expression, even if it's no more than a family joke about the long scarves that Aunt Florence used to knit as Christmas presents. But it could also be that somebody just plucked the words out of the air one Tuesday morning. One way or the other, the real birth of the expression was when somebody passed it along without caring what "nine yards" referred to.

The fact is that once you've said "the whole" it doesn't matter what words you finish it with or whether they mean anything or not — shooting match, enchilada, schmear, shebang? "The whole ball of wax" first showed up in the 1880s, though some writers say it comes from a 16th-century ritual for dividing up an estate among heirs. If you believe that, I've got a caboodle I want to sell you.

A number of years ago I started saying "the whole kazonga," just because I liked the sound of it. Nobody ever called me on it, but when I finally looked it up it turned out to be the name both of an Italian adult comic book and of a Zambian minister who was involved in a fertilizer scam. In the somewhat unlikely event that "the whole kazonga" ever catches on, you can be sure someone will explain how it originally comes from one or the other of those.

Still, it's hard to accept that it doesn't matter where the expression came from. Whether the measure is six yards or nine, it has a tantalizing specificity. It cries out for an explanation, and there are plenty of them at hand. Is it merely coincidence that six yards is the exact diameter of a pitcher's mound? The amount of cloth in a Varanasi sari? The length of a parachute line?

But that profusion of possibilities is the key to the idiom's appeal. If "the whole nine yards" had a definitive completion — if it went on to mention yards of cloth, cement or ammunition — it would never have caught on in the first place. It's like a line of poetry; it resonates without resolving.

Except that we don't think of this as poetry. A poet's images can bubble straight up out of the imagination; we don't ask for explanations or backstories. Would it really help to know where Gertrude Stein got "pigeons in the grass, alas" from? "Let me see, that was the day when Miss Stein and I were walking in the Luxembourg Gardens, and I started to sit on the lawn but she said, 'No, Alice' ... "

But that's just the kind of story we expect when the phrase originates in the collective imagination. So we rummage around in old ships and cement trucks looking for a secret key, as if there couldn't be any poetry in everyday language that didn't begin its life as prose.

This is odd. Take a look at this map of America at night. As you'd expect, the cities are ablaze, the Great Lakes and the oceans dark, but if you look at the center, where the Eastern lights give way to the empty Western plains, there's a mysterious clump of light there that makes me wonder.

It's a little to the left, high up near the Canadian border. Just run your eye up that line of lights at the center of the country, look over to the upper left: There's a patch that looks like a big city — but there is no big city in that part of North Dakota. There's mostly grass. So what are those lights doing there? What is that?

If you need help, here's the same map again; this time, the patch is marked with a circle. It turns out, yes, that's not a city. And those lights weren't there six years ago.

When you watch science fiction movies, you notice there are two things that seem like we will get in the future — a silver jumpsuit and driverless cars.

In the movie I, Robot, which is set in a futuristic 2035, Will Smith is sitting in the driver's seat of his Audi, relaxing and reading a magazine when he suddenly gets attacked by robots. Then the car, which is set on manual override, notifies him the obvious, "You're experiencing a car accident."

Jumping On The Band Wagon

Filip Brabec with Audi of America says the car company is still a couple of decades away from the film's depiction of technology, however, the car maker is navigating toward a new initiative.

It's become the first in the auto industry to test automated cars, in Nevada.

Although Google has been working on this for years with actual self-driving cars on the road, Google is not a car maker — yet.

President Obama lays down his marker on guns and exhorts Congress to act. But the House has no intention of voting to ban assault weapons, and rural Democrats in the Senate remain skittish. Meanwhile, Chuck Hagel gets some important backers in his bid to join the cabinet, and Mark Sanford hopes all is forgiven as he tries to return to Congress. But if he deserves a second chance, then so do NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving.

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In France, news that an apartment measuring less than 17 square feet had been rented out for 15 years is being cited as proof of an overly expensive real estate market in Paris. A 50-year-old man identified only as "Dominique" had been paying rent of 330 euros, or about $442, to live in the apartment.

The story was highlighted by the housing advocacy group Fondation Abbe Pierre, after the man asked for help dealing with his landlord. He had been living in a space that measured 1.56 square meters — or about 16.8 square feet.

"I come home, I go to bed," Dominique told the French website and radio station RTL, describing how he coped with living in the space.

A photograph released by the advocacy group shows the apartment has a skylight and a slanted roof, but "a person doesn't stand correctly" in the space, it said on its Twitter feed. It added that the photo might make the place seem larger than it actually is.

RTL reported the story Thursday, saying that three different real estate agencies had managed the apartment despite its small size. It added that the door to the "miniscule" apartment was now permanently closed — and the owner faces a court date later this month.

Le Monde reports that the legal minimum size of an apartment in Paris is 9 square meters. And it must include a shower.

It looks like All My Babies' Mamas isn't going to happen.

The Oxygen reality special was supposed to follow Shawty Lo, a rapper from Atlanta, and the complications that attend his relationships with the mothers (10) of his children (11). It was scheduled to premiere this spring, but almost as soon as it was announced in December, there was outcry from people who felt that the show propped up demeaning stereotypes about black people. Oxygen announced Tuesday that the show will be scuttled before it even airs. (Shawty Lo is reportedly fighting back with a petition of his own urging the network to reverse course again and let Babies' Mamas see the light of day.)

Babies' Mamas exists — or would have existed — in a television landscape that is increasingly devoid of shows with black casts, and the term "baby mama" itself makes a lot of people concerned about the number of black children are born to unmarried parents see red. It's a perfect storm of anxieties about cultural representation and pathologies. There aren't a lot of images of black people on TV, the argument goes. The ones that appear could at least be affirming, or barring that, not stereotypical.

A petition by Color of Change, an influential advocacy organization, accused Oxygen of trying to profit from "inaccurate, dehumanizing, and harmful perceptions of Black families."

The form-letter petition goes on:

Research shows that inflammatory images like these can result in real world consequences for our families, including less attention from doctors, harsher sentencing by judges, lower likelihood of being hired or admitted to school, lower odds of getting loans, and a higher likelihood of getting shot by police.

At a White House event with children who wrote him letters after the Dec. 14 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., President Obama today said the nation cannot wait any longer to do what can be done to reduce gun violence.

He unveiled a series of executive actions and calls for legislation that is sure to spark sharp debate in Washington. The steps he's taking, as expected, include calling on Congress to pass legislation banning "military-style assault weapons" and expanding background checks for gun buyers. He also announced 23 executive actions — such as "legal barriers in health laws that prevent some states from making information available about those prohibited from having guns" — that don't require Congressional action.

The president's various measures, the White House estimates, would cost about $500 million to implement. The Washington Post calls them "the most expansive gun-control policies in generations." They would be "the most sweeping changes to gun laws in nearly two decades," says the Wall Street Journal.

"Gun rights advocates," as NPR's Scott Horsley says, "have already promised stiff resistance." Even before the White House event, the National Rifle Association was calling the president an "elitist hypocrite."

While Obama promised to "put everything I've got into this," he also said that "pundits and politicians" will fight his proposals and claim he's waging an "all-out assault on liberty."

"The only way we can [get] change is if the American people demand it," he said. Americans, added Obama, need to "stand up and say 'enough.' "

The president also said that he has no wish to infringe on Americans' Second Amendment rights, but is taking "common sense measures that have the support of the majority of American people."

Vice President Biden, who joined the president at the midday event, lead the task force that developed the plan. The effort was launched in the days after the mass shooting at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School.

We live blogged as the announcement was made and afterward.

Update at 12:45 p.m. ET. Key Points Of The Plan:

— Obama is calling on Congress to pass legislation to "reinstate and strengthen the ban on assault weapons" that was in place from 1994 to 2004.

— He wants a law passed to prohibit the sale of ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

— The administration says "Congress should finish the job of protecting law enforcement and the public by banning the possession of armor-piercing ammunition by, and its transfer to, anyone other than the military and law enforcement."

— The federal government is taking executive action "to provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers."

— "The Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security will release — by May 2013 — a set of model, high-quality emergency management plans for schools, houses of worship, and institutions of higher education, along with best practices for developing these plans and training students and staff to follow them."

— An increase in efforts to "reach 750,000 young people through programs to identify mental illness early and refer them to treatment. ... The administration is calling for a new initiative, Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), to provide this training and set up systems to provide these referrals."

— Obama is directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal scientific agencies "to conduct research into the causes and prevention of gun violence." Congress has in recent years barred those agencies from using federal funds to "advocate or promote gun control." The White House argues that "research on gun violence is not advocacy; it is critical public health research."

White House 'fact sheet' on President Obama's executive actions related to gun violence by mmemmott

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar intends to step down at the end of March, his office confirms to NPR's Jeff Brady.

Word of Salazar's plan broke over night. According to The Denver Post, the former senator from Colorado intends to "return to Colorado to spend time with his family."

As the Post writes:

"Salazar has said in his four years he is most proud of improving the relationship the federal government has with American Indians, cleaning up the oil and gas program after former departments were plagued with scandal and nepotism, and broadening a clean energy agenda.

"The secretary established seven new national parks and 10 new wildlife refuges. He also launched 18 utility-scale solar energy projects on public lands. ...

"He has also dealt with several natural and environmental disasters, including the explosion of a BP-operated deep water oil well, Deepwater Horizon, in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. ...

"In his push to grow regulations for domestic energy production on federal lands — particularly post Deepwater Horizon — he often tangled with House Republicans, many of whom have called him one of the worst Interior secretaries in the history of the United States."

If you didn't know any better, you might think that even if new gun control proposals from President Obama become stalled in Washington's gridlock, the states will rush in to fill the void.

After all, under its Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York has responded to December's Newtown tragedy by passing legislation banning assault weapons and making it harder for seriously mentally ill individuals to legally obtain firearms.

Meanwhile, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a fellow Democrat, has announced that he is championing new restrictions to require anyone seeking a gun permit to take a mandatory training course and submit fingerprints to state authorities.

And yet one more Democrat, Gov. John Hickenlooper in Colorado, a state in a traditionally pro-gun region of the country, is calling for universal background checks for would-be gun purchasers. He would require anyone buying a firearm, even at a gun show or in a private sale, to pass a criminal background check.

There's an old newsroom adage that three is a trend. And the activity in these three states could certainly lead an observer to assume that there's a widespread movement in the states to act on gun control with a swiftness not found at the federal level.

But sometimes three doesn't really signal a larger trend. This is one of those times.

While the three aforementioned states and several others are considering new restrictions on guns following the pre-Christmas massacre of grade-schoolers and educators in Connecticut, there isn't much evidence of things on the state level shifting toward greater gun control.

The states considering further restrictions are all blue states.

In fact, in several red states, the shift is in the exact opposite direction. In Arizona, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, for instance, legislation has been introduced recently that would loosen gun restrictions or underscore gun owner rights.

While the gun control issue isn't a totally partisan one, the push for new limits is more likely to occur in states with Democratic governors and legislatures than in states in which the GOP controls the governor's mansion and legislature.

Keeping in mind that 30 states have Republican governors and 26 state legislatures are GOP-controlled, compared with the 19 that are controlled by Democrats (four are split; Nebraska's is nonpartisan), it's obvious that the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates have a substantial firewall in the states.

The firewall means that legislation in the states is likely to be only so effective, since — as has been seen in history — guns can easily make their way into states with strict restrictions from states with looser laws.

In 1993, Virginia instituted a gun sale restriction that limited buyers to one handgun a month, after research found that a disturbing number of guns sold in the state were being used in crimes elsewhere on the East Coast.

That restriction was repealed last year by the Republican-led Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. Robert McDonnell on the grounds that it interfered with the Second Amendment rights of citizens. The repeal, however, has once again raised fears that a flood of Virginia guns will find their way into the hands of criminals.

Something else to keep in mind is that not every Democratic governor is a sure champion for tough new gun control laws.

Take Gov. Jerry Brown of California who, in the past has described himself as a gun owner and hunter. Though Brown has signed gun control legislation during his governorship — for instance, a ban on openly carrying unloaded handguns in public — he has been relatively muted on the issue post-Newtown. He's made no promises on whether he would sign future gun-control bills.

So while it should be fairly obvious that new restrictions on guns face significant obstacles in the nation's capital, it's just as true that such efforts face significant headwinds in most states, as well.

House Republicans are taking a Solomonic approach to relief for areas ravaged by Superstorm Sandy.

Having already split financial aid for the Northeast into two votes, House leaders are now splitting the second package itself into two, giving conservatives the opportunity to oppose spending provisions they don't like.

Even so, a funding package of about $50 billion is expected to pass Tuesday. It's proven to be too politically dicey to vote against assistance for regions devastated by disaster.

"Those in coastal districts understand, we need the money and they're going to need the money [after some future disaster]," said an aide to Rep. Jon Runyan, R-N.J.

But the willingness of some House members to vote against aid in the face of a historic disaster has shown that the politics of relief are starting to shift. It might still be impossible to block federal rebuilding assistance, but there's a growing desire to take a different approach to the next set of disasters.

"The ad hoc, blank check approach that we've had for the last few decades is not one that we think is working very well," says Ray Lehmann, a senior fellow with R Street, a conservative think tank.

History Of The Vote

Speaker John Boehner angered Northeastern members of his own caucus by failing to take up a Senate-approved disaster relief package before the previous Congress' term ended early this month.

In response to their protests, Boehner decided to hold separate votes on Sandy relief. The first installment of $9.7 billion to help pay flood insurance claims came Jan. 4. It passed easily but drew 67 "no" votes from House Republicans, who received a great deal of criticism in the media — and from some of their colleagues.

Enlarge image i

On October 24, 2011, I had a bad day.

I honestly forget why. It was a Monday; that should be enough.

So as I've explained once before, I reached out on Twitter and asked for "feel-happy music." Recommendations overwhelmed me to the point where I rolled them up into a Spotify playlist I called, fittingly, "Begging The Public For Joy." That playlist currently has 659 subscribers, meaning that more than 600 of you are keeping track of it and perhaps use it to improve your own moods at times. I've listened to it over and over (and over) myself, and other than the significant soul blow it took when Spotify apparently lost the rights to "Don't Carry It All" by The Decemberists, it's aged very well. Some of it was music I knew well, but some of it I didn't know at all and now think of as essential — Melissa Ferrick's "Everything I Need," for instance.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar intends to step down at the end of March, his office confirms to NPR's Jeff Brady.

Word of Salazar's plan broke over night. According to The Denver Post, the former senator from Colorado intends to "return to Colorado to spend time with his family."

As the Post writes:

"Salazar has said in his four years he is most proud of improving the relationship the federal government has with American Indians, cleaning up the oil and gas program after former departments were plagued with scandal and nepotism, and broadening a clean energy agenda.

"The secretary established seven new national parks and 10 new wildlife refuges. He also launched 18 utility-scale solar energy projects on public lands. ...

"He has also dealt with several natural and environmental disasters, including the explosion of a BP-operated deep water oil well, Deepwater Horizon, in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. ...

"In his push to grow regulations for domestic energy production on federal lands — particularly post Deepwater Horizon — he often tangled with House Republicans, many of whom have called him one of the worst Interior secretaries in the history of the United States."

After five days of airstrikes aimed at Islamist rebels, French troops are engaged in their first ground battles with those forces in Mali, according to several news outlets.

France 24 reports that "French special forces began fighting on the ground with Islamist rebels in central Mali on Wednesday, according to regional security sources, six days after the European power launched an air offensive in the country."

The BBC writes that "French troops have been fighting Mali's Islamist rebels in street battles in the town of Diabaly, Malian and French sources say. In the first major ground operation in the conflict, French special forces were fighting alongside Malian troops."

Meanwhile, "foreign workers at a gas field in Algeria were believed to have been kidnapped Wednesday in what the U.K. government described as an 'ongoing terrorist incident,' " NBC News reports. Reuters says there may be more than 40 hostages, and that Americans may be among them. It adds that "the raid, claimed by an al-Qaida affiliate, came after Islamists had vowed to retaliate for France's military intervention in Mali."

We reported Monday that the militants had vowed to "strike at the heart of France. ... In Bamako, in Africa and in Europe."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar intends to step down at the end of March, his office confirms to NPR's Jeff Brady.

Word of Salazar's plan broke over night. According to The Denver Post, the former senator from Colorado intends to "return to Colorado to spend time with his family."

As the Post writes:

"Salazar has said in his four years he is most proud of improving the relationship the federal government has with American Indians, cleaning up the oil and gas program after former departments were plagued with scandal and nepotism, and broadening a clean energy agenda.

"The secretary established seven new national parks and 10 new wildlife refuges. He also launched 18 utility-scale solar energy projects on public lands. ...

"He has also dealt with several natural and environmental disasters, including the explosion of a BP-operated deep water oil well, Deepwater Horizon, in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. ...

"In his push to grow regulations for domestic energy production on federal lands — particularly post Deepwater Horizon — he often tangled with House Republicans, many of whom have called him one of the worst Interior secretaries in the history of the United States."

Whole Foods has played a key role in propelling organic foods into the mainstream. The specialty supermarket chain has more than 300 stores and plans to continue expanding. But outspoken founder and co-CEO John Mackey is not the crunchy granola liberal one might conjure while perusing aisles of earnestly labeled blue corn chips and gently misted red peppers.

In fact, he's a self-styled libertarian: a vegan who sells sustainably raised meat, a man who compares the government's health care overhaul to "fascism" but wants to improve American diets.

And he thinks big businesses have an obligation to change customers' perception that big corporations are "primarily selfish and greedy." (Not that he's opposed to profits. In fact, Whole Foods posted a 49 percent boost in quarterly earnings in November.)

Mackey sat down with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep to discuss his philosophy and the new book he co-authored, Conscious Capitalism. Part 1 airs Wednesday, Part 2 on Thursday.

Mackey tells Inskeep that companies must have a higher purpose than just making money.

Enlarge image i

If you didn't know any better, you might think that even if new gun control proposals from President Obama become stalled in Washington's gridlock, the states will rush in to fill the void.

After all, under its Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York has responded to December's Newtown tragedy by moving quickly on legislation to ban assault weapons and to make it harder for seriously mentally ill individuals to legally obtain firearms.

Meanwhile, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a fellow Democrat, has announced that he is championing new restrictions to require anyone seeking a gun permit to take a mandatory training course and submit fingerprints to state authorities.

And yet one more Democrat, Gov. John Hickenlooper in Colorado, a state in a traditionally pro-gun region of the country, is calling for universal background checks for would-be gun purchasers. He would require anyone buying a firearm, even at a gun show or in a private sale, to pass a criminal background check.

There's an old newsroom adage that three is a trend. And the activity in these three states could certainly lead an observer to assume that there's a widespread movement in the states to act on gun control with a swiftness not found at the federal level.

But sometimes three doesn't really signal a larger trend. This is one of those times.

While the three aforementioned states and several others are considering new restrictions on guns following the pre-Christmas massacre of grade-schoolers and educators in Connecticut, there isn't much evidence of things on the state level shifting toward greater gun control.

The states considering further restrictions are all blue states.

In fact, in several red states, the shift is in the exact opposite direction. In Arizona, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, for instance, legislation has been introduced recently that would loosen gun restrictions or underscore gun owner rights.

While the gun control issue isn't a totally partisan one, the push for new limits is more likely to occur in states with Democratic governors and legislatures than in states in which the GOP controls the governor's mansion and legislature.

Keeping in mind that 30 states have Republican governors and 26 state legislatures are GOP-controlled, compared with the 19 that are controlled by Democrats (four are split; Nebraska's is nonpartisan), it's obvious that the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates have a substantial firewall in the states.

The firewall means that legislation in the states is likely to be only so effective, since — as has been seen in history — guns can easily make their way into states with strict restrictions from states with looser laws.

In 1993, Virginia instituted a gun sale restriction that limited buyers to one handgun a month, after research found that a disturbing number of guns sold in the state were being used in crimes elsewhere on the East Coast.

That restriction was repealed last year by the Republican-led Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. Robert McDonnell on the grounds that it interfered with the Second Amendment rights of citizens. The repeal, however, has once again raised fears that a flood of Virginia guns will find their way into the hands of criminals.

Something else to keep in mind is that not every Democratic governor is a sure champion for tough new gun control laws.

Take Gov. Jerry Brown of California who, in the past has described himself as a gun owner and hunter. Though Brown has signed gun control legislation during his governorship — for instance, a ban on openly carrying unloaded handguns in public — he has been relatively muted on the issue post-Newtown. He's made no promises on whether he would sign future gun-control bills.

So while it should be fairly obvious that new restrictions on guns face significant obstacles in the nation's capital, it's just as true that such efforts face significant headwinds in most states, as well.

But what does it look like from space?

NASA's Earth Observatory released a pair of satellite images today that show Beijing and the surrounding areas on Monday and 11 days earlier, on Jan. 3.

NASA explains what seen on Monday's image:

"The brightest areas tend to be clouds or fog, which have a tinge of gray or yellow from the air pollution. Other cloud-free areas have a pall of gray and brown smog that mostly blots out the cities below. In areas where the ground is visible, some of the landscape is covered with lingering snow from storms in recent weeks."

One month after the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, gun control is on the national agenda. The White House will outline its proposals this week, and national surveys find a majority of Americans support options such as requiring background checks for both private and gun-show sales.

As NPR's Richard Gonzales found when he visited a large traveling gun show this past weekend, it seemed that the momentum behind new gun control proposals had brought a spike in business for gun sellers.

The San Francisco Gun Show was held at the Cow Palace, where Richard reported seeing "a line of a couple thousand people winding through the parking lot. And the line of cars to get into the parking lot is six blocks long."

He spoke to an attendee about the show's draw this year.

"Everybody is freaked out right now. So who knows?" hunter Robert Gonzales tells Richard with a sigh. Asked to explain, Gonzales answers, "They're freaked out that they're not going to be able to buy weapons I guess, you know. Cuz I been coming to this Cow Palace for years and I've never seen it this bad."

President Obama said Monday that he will unveil the White House's plan later this week; he was to meet with Vice President Biden today, to discuss the options Biden's gun control task force is recommending to the president.

"Some of them will require legislation," Obama said. "Some of them I can accomplish through executive action."

According to two national surveys released today, a majority of Americans support creating a federal database to track gun sales, requiring background checks for gun-show sales, and increasing the number of armed guards at schools.

Background supports drew the most support in the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey, with 85 percent in favor. The survey also found that 64 percent supported putting more armed guards or police in schools.

Another study, from The Washington Post and ABC, found similar result, with 52 percent of those responding said the Newtown shootings made them more likely to to support gun control. And both surveys found that more than 50 percent of Americans support banning assault style weapons.

On today's All Things Considered, Pew Director Michael Dimock tells Audie Cornish that despite the broad support, some of the options spur deep partisan divides. For instance, "among Republicans, you get fewer than half who would favor a federal government database on guns," he says. By contrast, 84 percent of Democrats are in favor.

And 44 percent of Republicans support a ban on assault weapons, while 69 percent of Democrats say they would support such a ban. Similar divides exist on the issues of banning semi-automatic weapons and ending the sale of ammunition online.

In Metairie, La., where Mike Mayer owns the Jefferson Gun Outlet, Mayer tells Richard that many of his customers are looking for the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, like the one used in the Newtown shootings.

"For a standard AR, something that we would sell normally for $899 is selling right now for $1850," Mayer tells Richard.

"What it really showed was because different cultures — the military, civilian, whatnot — all have their own lexicon, you can be having a conversation where you think you're communicating effectively ... but you're not," he says.

He says it's the responsibility of the military to explain to civilian leaders what its strategic goals are and what resources are needed to achieve them.

The Article That Ended His Career

McChrystal resigned after comments that he and his staff made about members of the Obama administration in what he believed to be an off-the-record setting to a Rolling Stone reporter. The magazine published the comments in an article titled "The Runaway General" in the summer of 2010.

Related NPR Stories

McChrystal Piece Stirs Debate On Covering Military July 2, 2010

Retail sales rose 0.5 percent in December from November, the Census Bureau says. That may be a sign that as 2012 ended consumers were still in a shopping mood even as lawmakers in Washington struggled to keep the federal government from going over the so-called fiscal cliff.

Bloomberg News says the better-than-expected sales figure, which is adjusted to hopefully smooth out the effects of the holidays and show the "real" growth, is a sign that consumers were looking "beyond the year-end budget battle among U.S. lawmakers."

"Consumers continue to spend at a decent pace," Russell Price, senior economist at Ameriprise Financial Inc. in Detroit, told Bloomberg.

Such spending is critical: Consumers purchase about 70 percent of the goods and services companies produce.

For the year, retail sales were up 5.2 percent.

Also this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wholesale prices declined 0.2 percent in December from November and were up just 1.3 percent for the year.

On this fourth day of French military operations aimed at routing Islamist militants in Mali, the al-Qaida-linked rebels are "vowing to drag France into a long and brutal ground war," Reuters reports.

"France has opened the gates of hell for all the French. She has fallen into a trap which is much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia," a spokesman for the MUJWA Islamist group told Europe 1 radio, the wire service writes.

Another militant spokesman, France 24 reports, told Agence France Presse that "France has attacked Islam. We will strike at the heart of France." On where the attacks might take place, he said, "everywhere. In Bamako, in Africa and in Europe."

According to Reuters: "Launching a counter-attack far to the southwest of recent fighting, the Islamists clashed fiercely with government forces on Monday in the central town of Diabaly, residents and Malian military sources said."

The news service quotes French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian as saying the insurgents have taken control of the town, but that French and Malian forces were hoping to push the rebels out again.

Sunday, as we reported, French officials said military operations had stopped the militants' advance. Islamists have been pushing to take control of Mali for more than a year and it's feared they will use the African nation as a base to launch terrorist operations elsewhere. They have also been destroying centuries-old historical sites.

France has, The New York Times adds, "called a meeting of the United Nations Security Council for Monday."

NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, who is monitoring the story from Senegal, tells our Newscast Desk that as the French airstrikes and other actions continue, "Mali awaits the arrival of an African force to help try to dislodge the insurgents."

Unusually, the pollution is getting headline treatment on local news bulletins and in the domestic media. This is in stark contrast to the situation in previous years, when pollution was rarely acknowledged, let alone reported. Since the beginning of the year, the government has been releasing hourly pollution readings for 74 Chinese cities, almost half of which are now showing severe pollution.

"There's been clarity as to the severity of the problem, there's more frequent disclosure of information, but what remains to be seen is whether more aggressive action will be taken to solve the problem," says Alex Wang, an expert of Chinese environmental law at the University of California, Berkeley, law school.

This follows intense public pressure on the issue, driven by the fact that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing operates its own pollution monitor, releasing hourly figures by Twitter. In the past two years, citizens noticed large discrepancies between the official Chinese figures and the U.S. ones, and began to question whether the Chinese statistics had been fudged or falsified.

"In theory, with the greater transparency, that's harder to do — the falsification or cheating the data," says Alex Wang. "What will be interesting to see going forward is that now that they've become more transparent — releasing hourly data and so forth — does it actually force the regulators to take regulatory action?"

Beijing is taking emergency action: shutting down some building sites and polluting factories temporarily and taking almost a third of official cars off the road. It's also vowing to cut air pollution by 15 percent over the next three years.

But the surrounding provinces are actually stepping up coal consumption, dooming such pledges, according to Greenpeace's Zhou Rong.

"It's not going to work if Beijing city does the mitigation work alone," she says. "If the surrounding areas don't do the same work, Beijing will never get better air quality."

A study by Greenpeace and Beijing University focusing on four Chinese cities estimates the number of people dying prematurely from air pollution is close to three times that killed by traffic accidents.

Monday morning, Beijing's main children's hospital was packed to overflowing, with rows of infants hooked up to drips in the corridors outside the emergency clinic, and queues of patients waiting to see doctors. According to official media, recently this hospital has seen 9,000 patients per day, a third of them with respiratory diseases.

"Of course it's connected to the pollution," says Louise Huang, who's here with her 18-month-old son. He started getting sick the first day of the smog, even though she hasn't dared open the windows or go outside. "This must get better," she tells me. "I can't imagine how we'd live if it got worse."

"There are too many cars on the streets, too many factories," says Wang Ying, whose baby is suffering respiratory problems. When asked whether she worries about the world her child will inherit, she replies, "Of course I'm scared."

In the Chinese media, there's been some soul-searching about why the problem has been so intense. The China Daily took the country's rapid urbanization process to task, commenting in an editorial, "The air quality in big cities could have been better had more attention been paid to the density of high rises, had more trees been planted in proportion to the number of residential areas, and had the number of cars been strictly controlled."

Meanwhile, the Global Times has been pointing out China's role as the global factory and the "biggest construction site in the world."

"Seventy percent of global iron and steel, and about half of the world's cement is produced in China," it says in an editorial. "Against this backdrop, it is impossible for China to be as clean as the West."

Among local people, there are fears for the future. One song circulating online includes the lyrics, "I live in this smog, I don't want to die in this smog." This environmental crisis risks dragging down economic growth, and given growing public dissatisfaction, it could yet become a political problem for China's new leaders.

Pilkey says there's a lot of him in the Captain Underpants series. He says he remembers what it was like to be a kid who got in trouble for his pranks. He also remembers what it was like to be a struggling reader. "I remember every kid in the class would have to stand up and read a chapter from our history book or something. And whenever it was my turn, everyone would just kind of groan, like 'Ugh, Pilkey's reading again.' And it just took me so long to get through it. I had all these really negative associations with reading. I just hated it," he says.

So he wanted to make a children's book that even kids like him would find irresistible. But some grown-ups, true to form, think it's inappropriate for the heroes of a children's book to be such troublemakers. George and Harold are big-time pranksters. They draw a comic strip in which they turn their mean principal into the superhero Captain Underpants who wears nothing but a red cape and underwear. This, and other bad-boy behavior, has landed Captain Underpants on the American Library Association's "Hit List," the annual top 10 list of most-complained about books. Pat Scales, chair of the ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee, says, "The No. 1 complaint is — this is kind of funny — nudity. I guess because the superhero has on jockey shorts. [Also] vulgar language, and they feel that kids are being taught not to obey authority."

In the books, the principal hates George and Harold's comic strip. Some parents have problems with it too, not for the content, but for all the misspellings. "Laugh" is spelled "laff." "Trouble" is spelled "trubbel." Rex Exnicios, 7, from New Orleans says that really bugs his mom. "She gets really mad ... She just says, 'That's misspelled,' and then says, 'This is how you actually spell it,' and then she spells it," he says.

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The Iran hostage thriller Argo was a surprise best-drama winner at Sunday's Golden Globes, beating out the Civil War epic Lincoln, which had emerged as an awards-season favorite.

Argo also claimed the directing prize for Ben Affleck, a prize that normally bodes well for an Academy Award win — except he missed out on an Oscar nomination this time.

Affleck's now in an unusual position during Hollywood's long awards season, taking home the top filmmaking trophy at the second-highest film honors knowing he does not have a shot at an Oscar.

And the night left Argo taking home the top prize at the Globes but standing as a longshot for best picture at the Feb. 24 Oscars, where films almost never win if their directors are not nominated.

In a breathless, rapid-fire speech, Affleck gushed over the names of other nominees presenter Halle Berry had read off: Steven Spielberg for Lincoln, Ang Lee for Life of Pi, Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained.

"Look, I don't care what the award is. When they put your name next to the names she just read off, it's an extraordinary thing in your life," Affleck said.

Les Miserables was named best musical or comedy, while Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway claimed acting prizes.

Besides the three wins for Les Miserables and two for Argo, the show was a mixed bag, with awards spreads around a number of films. Lincoln came in leading with seven nominations but lost all but one, for Daniel Day-Lewis as best actor in the title role of Lincoln.

"If I had this on a timeshare basis with my wonderful gifted colleagues, I might just hope to keep it for one day of the year, and I'd be happy with that," said Day-Lewis, who previously won a Globe for There Will Be Blood and is a two-time Oscar winner with a strong shot at a third.

Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain won the Globe for dramatic actress as a CIA agent obsessively pursuing Bin Laden.

Other acting prizes went to Jennifer Lawrence as best musical or comedy actress for the oddball romance Silver Linings Playbook and Christoph Waltz as supporting actor for the slave-revenge tale Django Unchained.

Les Miserables, the musical based on Victor Hugo's classic novel earned Jackman the Globe for musical or comedy actor as tragic hero Jean Valjean. Hathaway won supporting actress as a single mom forced into prostitution.

"Thank you for this lovely blunt object that I will forevermore use as a weapon against self-doubt," Hathaway said.

Jackman was a bit hoarse from the flu, but his Globe win seemed to be the right antidote.

"I was kicking myself for not getting the flu shot, but it appears that you don't need one. I feel great," Jackman said.

But when it comes to Hollywood's highest honors, Les Miserables already has a big obstacle, also failing to earn a best-director slot for filmmaker Tom Hooper at the Feb. 24 Oscars.

Last Thursday's Oscar nominations held some shockers, including the omission of Affleck from the directing lineup, along with fellow Globe nominee Bigelow. Bigelow and Affleck also were nominated for top honors by the Directors Guild of America, whose contenders usually match up closely with the Oscar field.

Former President Bill Clinton upstaged Hollywood's elite with a surprise appearance to introduce Spielberg's Civil War epic Lincoln, which was up for best drama. The film chronicles Abraham Lincoln's final months as he tries to end the war and find common ground in a divided Congress to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

Lincoln's effort was "forged in a cauldron of both principle and compromise," Clinton said. "This brilliant film shows us how he did it and gives us hope that we can do it again."

Amy Poehler, co-host of the Globes with Tina Fey, gushed afterward, "Wow, what an exciting special guest! That was Hillary Clinton's husband!"

Lawrence won as best actress in a musical or comedy for her role as a troubled widow in a shaky new relationship. The Globe winners in musical or comedy categories often aren't factors at the Oscars, which tend to favor heavier dramatic roles.

But Silver Linings Playbook is a crowd-pleasing comic drama with deeper themes than the usual comedy. And Lawrence — a 2010 Oscar nominee for her breakout film Winter's Bone who shot to superstardom with The Hunger Games — delivers a nice mix of humor and melancholy.

"What does this say? I beat Meryl," Lawrence joked as she looked at her award, referring to fellow nominee and multiple Globe winner Meryl Streep. Lawrence went on to thank her mother for believing in her and her father for making her maintain a sense of humor.

Waltz won supporting actor for his role as a genteel bounty hunter who takes on an ex-slave as apprentice.

The win was Waltz's second supporting-actor prize at the Globes, both of them coming in Tarantino films. Waltz's violent but paternal and polite character in Django Unchained is a sharp contrast to the wickedly bloodthirsty Nazi he played in his Globe and Oscar-winning role in Tarantino's 2009 tale Inglourious Basterds.

"Let me gasp," said Waltz, whose competition included Django co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. "Quentin, you know that my indebtedness to you and my gratitude knows no words."

Tarantino won the screenplay prize for Django Unchained. He thanked his cast and also the group of friends to whom he reads work-in-progress for reaction.

"You guys don't know how important you are to my process. I don't want input. I don't want you to tell me if I'm doing anything wrong. Heavens forbid," Tarantino said. "When I read it to you, I hear it through your ears, and it lets me know I'm on the right track."

The Scottish tale Brave won for best animated film. It was the sixth win for Disney's Pixar Animation unit in the seven years since the Globes added the category.

Austrian director Michael Haneke's old-age love story Amour, a surprise best-picture nominee for the Oscars, won the Globe for foreign-language film. The top prize winner at last May's Cannes Film Festival, Amour is a grim yet moving portrait of an elderly woman tended by her husband as she is incapacitated by age.

Pop star Adele and co-writer Paul Epworth won for best song for their theme tune to the James Bond adventure Skyfall.

"Oh, my God!" Adele gushed repeatedly, before offering gratitude to the group that presents the Globes. "I'd like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press. I never thought I'd say that."

The prize for musical score went to Mychael Danna for the lost-at-sea tale Life of Pi.

Show hosts Fey and Poehler, who co-starred in the 2008 big-screen comedy Baby Mama, had a friendly rivalry at the Globes. Both were nominated for best actress in a TV comedy series, Fey for 30 Rock and Poehler for Parks and Recreation.

"Tina, I just want to say that I very much hope that I win," Poehler told Fey at the start of the show.

"Thank you. You're my nemesis. Thank you," Fey replied.

Neither won. Lena Dunham claimed the comedy series Globe for Girls.

After that, Fey and Poehler showed up on stage with cocktail glasses, Fey joking that it was time to start drinking.

"Everyone's getting a little loose now that we're all losers," Poehler said.

Among other TV winners, Julianne Moore won a best-actress Globe for her role as Sarah Palin in "Game Change," which also was picked as best TV miniseries or movie and earned Ed Harris a supporting-actor prize. Best actor in a miniseries or movie went to Kevin Costner for "Hatfields & McCoys." "Homeland" was named best TV drama series, and its stars Claire Danes and Damian Lewis received the dramatic acting awards. Maggie Smith won as supporting actress for Downton Abbey.

There are those who say "just because you can doesn't mean you should," and there are those who try to respond to that, but they can't, because their mouths are full of deep-fried bacon.

Robert, his daughter Talia, and I went to Weiner And Still Champion, a restaurant just north of Chicago, to try some.

Talia: It's like they asked themselves "how do you make bacon more unhealthy?" and then they did it.

Ian: It was this, or sharpen it into little bacon blades and start stabbin'.

Enlarge image i

Maybe some readers recall Immanuel Velikovsky's 1950 mega bestseller Worlds in Collision. The book, which caused a real sensation at the time, was an attempt to "explain" many of the big cataclysms and "miracles" recorded in mythic and folkloric narratives of ancient cultures as real astrophysical events. Velikovsky's thesis was that narratives of floods and mass destructions were not just allegorical or metaphorical but records of events that did take place. Mythic and biblical catastrophism had a historical and a scientific value to them.

In Velikovsky's theory, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a kind of comet sometime around the 15th century BCE. Its periodic passage by Earth caused all sorts of havoc. His mythic inspiration came from Greek mythology, in particular the fable where Athena (Venus) was ejected from the head of Zeus (Jupiter). In spite of its popular appeal, the astronomical community summarily dismissed Velikovsky's ideas, a key player having been none other than Carl Sagan, who knew a lot about Venus and its atmosphere. In any case, Velikovsky's celestial catastrophism follows on the footsteps of many claims of apocalyptic endings due to upheavals in the skies. And even if his thesis was unfounded, bad things can and do happen from time to time due to collisions between "worlds." Think, for example, of the demise of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago due a collision with a seven-mile wide asteroid.

Still, Velikovsky's doomsday imaginings are a child's play compared to some catastrophic ideas that modern cosmologists have been putting forward. I don't mean the devastation caused by a collision with an asteroid or comet, but of whole universes colliding with one another, including with our own.

Welcome to cosmic catastrophism.

The universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. However, current observations indicate that this expansion wasn't always at the same rate. Right at the beginning of time, the cosmos underwent a short period of hyper-accelerated expansion called inflation. According to this theory, proposed by MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in 1981, our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

Now imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since physics is an empirical science, any hypothesis needs to be tested before being accepted by the community. This is as true for a ball rolling down a hill as for Guth's inflating universe or the multiverse. For the ball, we know how to apply Newton's laws of motion to describe its rolling and the results come out in excellent agreement with observations. Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub. These two predictions have been confirmed, although a skeptic could argue that inflation was designed to accommodate these two observational facts about the universe. To its merit, inflation also offers an explanation as to how galaxies were first born and then grouped together in clusters, something that no other theory can do satisfactorily. Cosmologists like inflation a lot for its simplicity and range of explanation.

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"? This has been a sticky point with the multiverse and indeed, the notion that the multiverse extends perhaps to spatial infinity is untestable. Infinity makes sense mathematically and may even be realized in Nature; but we will never know for sure.

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision. These perturbations would be registered in the cosmic radiation and could, in principle, be observed. Matthew Kleban from New York University and his collaborators, and Anthony Aguirre from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his have been studying what kinds of signals would be left over from these dramatic events. Kleban found a unique signature, concentric rings where the radiation temperature would show a characteristic fluctuation. On top of the rings the radiation itself would be polarized, that is, it would oscillate in tandem in a specific direction of the sky. At least for now, no telltale rings have been found in the cosmic radiation, although the European satellite Planck promises to deliver more accurate polarization data that may shed light on the issue.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.

I will not spoil the reader's pleasure in watching the relationship between mother and daughter unfold, including a confrontation between 9-year-old Sonia and her mother, who locked herself in a dark room for months after her husband's death. But this is a story of human triumph, not just for the future justice, but for her mother, for her doctor brother and, though it may be a cliche, for the American dream.

It is a story too of Latin life in America, rich with descriptions of food and parties at her grandmother's house, complete with dancing, recitations of poetry and even forbidden seances, calling forth the spirits.

Sotomayor's tale of moving from the poverty of the projects to life at Princeton and Yale is entertaining and informative, reminding us that especially in the pre-Internet era, but probably now too, children whose parents live meager paycheck-to-paycheck lives can be amazingly isolated. Sotomayor didn't know what "the Ivies" were when a friend told her she should apply to them. The nuns at Cardinal Spellman High School suggested she apply to Fordham. But she initially lusted for Harvard after seeing Love Story, and she disdained Fordham, admitting ruefully in the book that she might have been more willing to apply there if she had known that many of the campus scenes in the movie were actually filmed at Fordham. In the end though, Harvard terrified her when she visited the school for an interview. It was so alien that she literally fled.

Later, her naivete leads to some hilarious scenes at Princeton, as when she throws away an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa, believing it to be a "scam." Only the intervention of an eagle-eyed friend, who saw the letter in the trash, saved the day.

Sotomayor goes to considerable lengths to say she is not "self-made." She candidly describes her struggles and failures, starting with how she learned to study in middle school: She asked the girl who got the most gold stars. But it soon becomes clear that while she needed help from lots of people to succeed, her own devotion to work and discipline have been the mainstays of her life.

At Princeton, she quickly realized she was deficient in English and in writing skills, prompting her to design for herself a crash course in writing and reading the classics. It was not the first time she would fall on her face but pick herself up and work like a demon to improve. In her first legal job, as a summer associate in a big New York firm, she failed miserably. After law school she describes her beginning panics as a "duckling" handling misdemeanors in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and how she transformed herself into a top felony prosecutor. After four years, though, she decided to leave, fearing she was losing her humanity. "I could see the signs that I too was hardening, and I didn't like what I saw. Even my sympathy for the victims, once such an inexhaustible driver of my efforts, was being depleted by the daily spectacle of misdeeds and misery."

She is similarly candid in describing her marriage and divorce.

Sotomayor writes with a sense of humor. Describing her post-divorce life, she observes wryly, "Probably nothing constrained my dating life as much as living at home with my mother. To hear her screaming from the bedroom, 'Sonia, it's midnight. You have to work tomorrow!' did not exactly make me feel like Mary Tyler Moore. "

For the reader, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Sotomayor personality turns out to be the way she confronts her fears and failures. She doesn't do well in a course, so she enrolls in a harder one on the same subject. She is afraid of swimming, so she takes swimming lessons and becomes a regular in the pool. She is a clumsy klutz, so she decides to soothe the heartache of a failed romance by taking Salsa lessons and learns to dance. Even her looks and clothes — something she always claimed to have no interest in because she couldn't compete with her stylish mother — she eventually learns to deal with. She takes shopping lessons from a friend and gets her own style.

In the forward to her book, Sotomayor writes: "I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability. I will be judged as a human being by what readers find here. There are hazards to openness, but they seem minor compared with the possibility that some readers may find comfort, perhaps even inspiration, from a close examination of how an ordinary person, with strengths and weaknesses like anyone else, has managed an extraordinary journey."

It is an apt observation, except that after reading the book, few will think she is ordinary.

Democrats are fond of saying that Republicans are interested in only one thing, and that is to thwart President Obama at every opportunity. He proposes something, the GOP opposes it. He says it's day, they say it's night. In some cases, those complaints are justified; in others, it's just whining.

But it's a complex story about the opposition to Obama's choice of Chuck Hagel, the former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska, to become the next secretary of defense. It may not be about Obama at all.

Back home, during his 12 years in the Senate, Hagel was enormously popular. In 2002, he was re-elected with 83 percent of the vote, the largest landslide in Nebraska Senate history. But his relationship with Republicans in Washington is and has always been more complicated.

Hagel, who left the Senate after 2008, would if confirmed become the first Vietnam veteran to head up the department. While Obama has pointed to Hagel's tour of duty in Southeast Asia — where he won two Purple Hearts — as positives, his opponents are focusing on a different part of the world.

A sizable amount of the criticism is over the issue of Israel. Hagel has been famously quoted for having said in 2006, "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," and "I'm not an Israeli senator. I'm a United States senator." He also said, "I support Israel, but my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States — not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I'll do that."

In addition, he broke with his party regarding the efficacy of sanctions against Iran and has said things about Hamas and Hezbollah that have troubled senators on both sides of the aisle, especially supporters of Israel.

In light of the above, Jewish groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Council, have been publicly expressing their concerns about the nomination, though neither has announced outright opposition. Other Hagel critics have gone further, saying that his comments make him anti-Semitic, or anti-Israel. Now, while railing against the "Jewish lobby" might not be the most politic way of making a point, questioning Israel's policies does not make one anti-Semitic. And while one might question the logic or reality of trying to engage with Iran, advocating such a policy does not necessarily make one anti-Israel. But the charge has been raised.

Also, although he voted to authorize the war in Iraq, he became a leading GOP critic of President Bush's surge, at one point calling the administration's strategy "pitiful," comments that probably led to his falling out with John McCain, whom he had endorsed for president in 2000. (He also criticized Bush for describing Iran as part of the "axis of evil.") The neocons who backed Bush's conduct of the war are among Hagel's leading opponents today.

Then there's his position on gays. During the 1998 confirmation hearings for James Hormel, President Clinton's choice for ambassador to Luxembourg, Hagel made clear he felt he wasn't qualified, calling him "openly, aggressively gay." Hagel waited until last month, as word spread about his possible nomination, before he apologized for those comments. Several gay and lesbian groups have accepted his apology, though not the Log Cabin Republicans, the gay GOP organization.

While no counts have been taken, Senate hesitation to Hagel's nomination doesn't seem to be large but it is significant, and most of it comes from his fellow Republicans. (South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, for one, called it "incredibly controversial," an "in your face" choice by Obama "to all of us who are supportive of Israel.")

Other conservatives have expressed their unhappiness with the pick. Jennifer Rubin, a right-wing blogger at washingtonpost.com, called the nomination "so outrageous that it becomes an easy 'no' vote for all Republicans." She suggested the GOP take a page out of the Ted Kennedy playbook, in which he ferociously attacked President Reagan's choice of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court:

"If Republicans had nervy firebrands like the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, someone would rise up to declare, 'Chuck Hagel's America is a land in which gays would be forced back in the closet and Jews would be accused of dual loyalty. Chuck Hagel's world is one in which devastating defense cuts become a goal, not a problem; we enter direct talks with the terrorist organization Hamas; and sanctions on Iran wither.'"

Maybe some readers recall Immanuel Velikovsky's 1950 mega bestseller Worlds in Collision. The book, which caused a real sensation at the time, was an attempt to "explain" many of the big cataclysms and "miracles" recorded in mythic and folkloric narratives of ancient cultures as real astrophysical events. Velikovsky's thesis was that narratives of floods and mass destructions were not just allegorical or metaphorical but records of events that did take place. Mythic and biblical catastrophism had a historical and a scientific value to them.

In Velikovsky's theory, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a kind of comet sometime around the 15th century BCE. Its periodic passage by Earth caused all sorts of havoc. His mythic inspiration came from Greek mythology, in particular the fable where Athena (Venus) was ejected from the head of Zeus (Jupiter). In spite of its popular appeal, the astronomical community summarily dismissed Velikovsky's ideas, a key player having been none other than Carl Sagan, who knew a lot about Venus and its atmosphere. In any case, Velikovsky's celestial catastrophism follows on the footsteps of many claims of apocalyptic endings due to upheavals in the skies. And even if his thesis was unfounded, bad things can and do happen from time to time due to collisions between "worlds." Think, for example, of the demise of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago due a collision with a seven-mile wide asteroid.

Still, Velikovsky's doomsday imaginings are a child's play compared to some catastrophic ideas that modern cosmologists have been putting forward. I don't mean the devastation caused by a collision with an asteroid or comet, but of whole universes colliding with one another, including with our own.

Welcome to cosmic catastrophism.

The universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. However, current observations indicate that this expansion wasn't always at the same rate. Right at the beginning of time, the cosmos underwent a short period of hyper-accelerated expansion called inflation. According to this theory, proposed by MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in 1981, our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

Now imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since physics is an empirical science, any hypothesis needs to be tested before being accepted by the community. This is as true for a ball rolling down a hill as for Guth's inflating universe or the multiverse. For the ball, we know how to apply Newton's laws of motion to describe its rolling and the results come out in excellent agreement with observations. Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub. These two predictions have been confirmed, although a skeptic could argue that inflation was designed to accommodate these two observational facts about the universe. To its merit, inflation also offers an explanation as to how galaxies were first born and then grouped together in clusters, something that no other theory can do satisfactorily. Cosmologists like inflation a lot for its simplicity and range of explanation.

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"? This has been a sticky point with the multiverse and indeed, the notion that the multiverse extends perhaps to spatial infinity is untestable. Infinity makes sense mathematically and may even be realized in Nature; but we will never know for sure.

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision. These perturbations would be registered in the cosmic radiation and could, in principle, be observed. Matthew Kleban from New York University and his collaborators, and Anthony Aguirre from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his have been studying what kinds of signals would be left over from these dramatic events. Kleban found a unique signature, concentric rings where the radiation temperature would show a characteristic fluctuation. On top of the rings the radiation itself would be polarized, that is, it would oscillate in tandem in a specific direction of the sky. At least for now, no telltale rings have been found in the cosmic radiation, although the European satellite Planck promises to deliver more accurate polarization data that may shed light on the issue.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.