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It's hard to go unnoticed in New York City, with everyone checking out the latest fashions and hairstyles. As the weather warms, some women who are shedding those winter layers are finding themselves the object of more cat calls, whistles and roving eyes than they'd like.

Artist Tatayana Fazlalizadeh is not going to take it anymore.

Under the cover of darkness, wearing a black knit hit, black leather jacket and black Chuck Taylors, Fazlalizadeh is nearly invisible. She's scouring Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for a blank canvas.

"This is one of those spaces that I'm not sure about if it'll work," Fazlalizadeh says. "I might put this up and tomorrow morning it'll be taken down because it's somebody's property. I don't know, but we're going to try it anyway."

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Anti-government protesters in Turkey are refusing to leave Istanbul's Taksim Square despite the prime minister's pledge not to develop its Gezi Park site, setting the stage for another confrontation between demonstrators and police.

"We will continue our resistance in the face of any injustice and unfairness taking place in our country," the Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella group of protesters, said in a statement Saturday.

The protest began as a dispute over developing Gezi Park, but quickly blossomed into a broader protest against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamic-leaning government.

The resistance encompasses "citizens' anger that accumulated over 11 years of A.K.P. government," the statement said, referring to the acronym for the ruling Justice and Development Party.

NPR's Peter Kenyon, reporting from Istanbul, says the government has been trying to downplay the two-week-old protests by clamping down on broadcasters who aired the demonstrations.

Peter says that some of the protesters have taken to T-shirts around Gezi Park showing a penguin with a gas mask and anarchy symbol — a mocking stab at one television channel that aired a wildlife documentary as police moved into the park to tear-gas the demonstrators.

"While he was in Iraq, at night I couldn't sleep," Robert Stokely says of his son, Michael.

Sgt. Michael Stokely served in the Georgia Army National Guard. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005.

"I used to look at the moon a lot," Robert Stokely says, "and I told Mike, 'When you see the moon, know that eight hours later I'll see it too, and I'll think about you.' "

On Aug. 8, 2005, Michael called his father, and Robert asked if he would still be coming home in two weeks. "I can't take this anymore," he said.

"[Michael] said, 'I love you, and I'll see you soon.' And those were the last words I heard from him," Robert says.

Michael Stokely, 23, was killed by an improvised explosive device eight days after their conversation. He died on the side of the road.

"I felt guilty I wasn't there to hold him when he died, and comfort him. I felt guilty I wasn't able to protect him," Robert Stokely says. "So, I just had to go there and see what this place looked like. I just wanted to see where my son died. And I couldn't live if I didn't go."

In November 2011, Robert flew to Iraq via Amman, Jordan, with a security team. They stayed in a safe house in Baghdad.

"I sat on the roof for hours, and I just looked at the moon overhead. And I thought, I am 16 miles away. I am so close," he says.

Robert wanted to put an engraved piece of marble at the site of his son's death. The next morning, the group passed through four checkpoints — but couldn't clear the fifth.

"It was just so dangerous they wouldn't let us through, and they turned us back. So we were unable to get there," Stokely says. "I wanted to kneel where Mike fell and touch that spot. I didn't get to do that.

"Maybe God had a reason why I didn't go that last mile and a half, but I did get to ride some of the same roads Mike rode. So rather than feeling sorry that I didn't get there, I'm going to be happy that I got that close. I got close enough."

Audio produced for Weekend Edition Saturday by Yasmina Guerda.

White House economic adviser Alan Krueger took some ribbing from his boss this week. President Obama noted that Krueger will soon be leaving Washington to go back to his old job, teaching economics at Princeton.

"And now that Alan has some free time, he can return to another burning passion of his: 'Rockanomics,' the economics of rock and roll," the president said. "This is something that Alan actually cares about."

In fact, Krueger gave a speech this week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where he said the music business offers valuable lessons about the broader U.S. economy.

For More

Read Alan Krueger's full speech

If you woke up this morning thinking, "I really need to hear NPR's Linda Wertheimer say the words 'noisily unwrapping her Twizzlers,'" have I got good news for you.

Margot Adler had a story on today's Morning Edition about Broadway audiences and whether they're getting ruder, given recent incidents involving the aforementioned Twizzlers, rude texting, talking and other interruptions. She went to the TKTS line (where you wait for discount Broadway tickets) and asked some of the folks what they thought.

Some offered the usual explanations — say, that we're all used to sitting in our living rooms watching alone, and we don't remember what it's like to use our polite-company manners anymore. One speculated that as theater has gotten more casual (less dressy, drinks allowed), people's behavior has lost its polite formality.

Jan Simpson, the writer of one blog about Broadway, actually calls herself "old-fashioned" for wanting people to sit quietly while watching a show, which I can tell you caused the writer of one blog about popular culture to clutch her metaphorical pearls in horror at the thought that there's something modern about being a disruptive buffoon. Adler acknowledges that in fact, "in Shakespeare's time, they threw food on the stage." Of course, in Shakespeare's time, they died of various things we've cured, so let's not embrace that too eagerly.

What emerges is partly a generational issue setting younger audiences who want to tweet about the show while it's happening (mon dieu!) against older, perhaps more experienced audiences who take a less consumer-oriented and more art-patron-oriented approach to attendance. But surely, a person of any age is capable of doing without Twitter for a couple of hours. I can do without Twitter for a couple of hours, for example, and I've been known to tweet about people clipping their nails on the Metro.

It's a good thing, indeed, to avoid taking theater and making it a cloistered place for elites only (not that ticket prices don't get you a good part of the way there). But it's also a good thing to avoid giving free passes out of Rudeness Jail for everyone who simply prefers not to iron anything except cargo shorts.

OK, OK, I don't really care if you wear cargo shorts. But the pockets should not be stuffed with things that beep, smoke, smell like garlic or tempt you to whisper.

Deal?

As the controversy over the National Security Agency's phone and Internet data gathering reminds us, one of Congress's most challenging assignments is oversight of the nation's intelligence community.

Keeping tabs on that the part of the federal government which constantly invokes national security to justify its opaqueness has its obvious difficulties and frustrations regardless of which party controls the House or Senate.

Those frustrations came through in a conversation I had with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, who has served on the House Intelligence Committee for six years. She's the top Democrat on the Intelligence oversight subcommittee.

How challenging is it for lawmakers to do oversight of the intelligence community given all the secrecy? I asked.

SCHAKOWSKY: "There's a number of challenges for all of us on the Intelligence Committee because all of us, maybe with the exception of the chairman and ranking member who may spend most of their time dealing with the issues of the Intelligence Committee, most of the rest of us are definitely part-timers. We work on other committees.

So the responsibility of oversight of 16 intelligence agencies, including the huge ones of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, it's a tremendous responsibility. And yet the cards are stacked against us in many ways, in terms of doing a really good job, particularly for the rank and file.

"Often it's just the chairman and ranking member on both the House and the Senate intelligence committees that are fully read into all the classified information and the covert operations. So we're not always fully up to date and fully briefed on everything."

Call Me Kuchu

Director: Katherine Fairfax Wright, Malika Zouhali-Worrall

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Running Time: 87 minutes

With: David Kato, Christopher Senyonjo

(Recommended)

To: The National Security Agency

From: The Protojournalist

Subject: Please feel free to read our email exchange with Wendy Nather, a hightech analyst who focuses on security issues at 451 Research in Austin, Texas. Not that you need our permission.

Dear Wendy Nather,

I am writing a blogpost for NPR's website about legitimate paranoia when it comes to life online. After seeing your thoughtful piece about PRISM [the U.S. government's Internet-monitoring program] on the Dark Reading website. I hoped you might be able to elevate the story.

Perhaps the NSA is not really monitoring our day-to-day dealings with websites. But are there other types of people who are keeping an eye on our online engagements — identity thieves, webcam hijackers, insurance detectives, people who want to obtain information about our online habits and use that information for their own benefit?

Wendy Nather's Reply

I don't think it's a matter of being too paranoid, so much as knowing which things are more appropriate to be paranoid about. :-)

One of the things that we have lost with the Internet is the ability not to be singled out. It used to be that you had to work hard to gather information on one person, even if that data was publicly available somehow: you had to go to offices, to the library, search newspaper archives, etc. But now all you have to do is decide that you want to research someone, and the searching takes only minutes or a couple of hours if you know what you're doing.

This is the difference between what we traditionally understand as our Fourth Amendment rights and what advertisers, the government, law enforcement, and entities of any kind are able to do today. They can gather aggregate information on huge populations, and you might be in there — but if someone decides to query your data individually, is that the part that constitutes "unreasonable search"? Is just possessing the data considered a search? Or is it when they construct the database query that brings up your name and your data together for intentional viewing? We don't know, and that's the very thin dividing line that used to be thicker.

So yes, anyone can search out your information for different reasons. The only question is the probability of that happening. You should probably be most concerned about anyone who would have a reason to want to single you out:

Angry exes

Employers (or potential ones)

Anyone who wants to validate information about you (such as a public assertion you've made, or a benefit you've applied for)

Curious family or friends (my mother has had a Google Alert on me for years ;-)

Anyone who is investigating someone you're connected to in some way (law enforcement, government agencies)

Anyone else who is angry enough with you to want retribution, and who is the type to be able to do it online

Yes, we should be worried about credit card fraud, which is different from identity theft. The former is done in bulk today, without discrimination, as opposed to the latter, which is often done by someone who has reason to know more of your biographical data to make the identity theft more complete.

In my opinion, the general population should not be too worried about being singled out. However, the fact that the government is collecting the type of data already that makes it even easier to do just that, at the drop of a hat, is something that we as a society should discuss. We should figure out how to make the barrier higher to being singled out, as opposed to making the barrier higher to collecting our data, because that's already too late.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Wendy Nather

Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode What Is Beauty?

About Bill Strickland's TEDTalk

Bill Strickland tells a quiet and astonishing tale of redemption through arts, music and unlikely partnerships.

About Bill Strickland

As a Pittsburgh youth besieged by racism in the crumbling remains of the steel economy, Bill Strickland should have been one of the Rust Belt's casualties. Instead, he discovered the potter's wheel and the transforming power of fountains, irrepressible dreams and the slideshow. While moonlighting as an airline pilot, Strickland founded Manchester Bidwell, a world-class institute in his native Pittsburgh devoted to vocational instruction in partnership with big business — and, almost incidentally, home to a Grammy-winning record label and a world-class jazz performance series.

This week's podcast highlights the familiar choice facing Americans in the wake of the NSA news: privacy vs. security. The case of Edward Snowden offers up another choice: hero or traitor? For Massachusetts voters, it's Ed Markey vs. Gabriel Gomez. In New Jersey, it's Cory Booker vs. the rest of the field. The real choice facing our nation: Ken Rudin vs. Ron Elving.

With two weeks until the Massachusetts special Senate election, the obvious question is: Can Republicans pull off another stunning upset like they did three years ago?

Back then, in the very blue Bay State, Republican Scott Brown won the seat left vacant by Ted Kennedy's death by riding a Tea Party and anti-Obamacare wave amplified by voter distress over a sour economy.

An improved economy has changed some of the dynamics since Brown's 2010 win. But it's understandable if Democrats might be having flashbacks right about now regarding the seat left vacant when John Kerry became U.S. secretary of state. Recent polling suggests the lead held by 18-term Democratic Rep. Ed Markey over Republican political newcomer Gabriel Gomez has dropped into the single digits from what was once a substantial double-digit advantage.

Wednesday, President Obama visited Massachusetts to campaign for Markey against Gomez, a onetime Navy SEAL who later worked for a private equity firm.

Obama's comments at a Markey campaign event held in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood were aimed at countering Gomez's constantly repeated allegations that Markey is a nearly four-decade-long Washington fixture who's had a hand in everything that's gone wrong over that period. Obama said:

"Ed has a track record, and that's why you know what he's going to do when he's a senator from the commonwealth of Massachusetts. He's not somebody who comes out of nowhere and says he's for something, and then maybe he's for something else.

"He's been steady, and he's been constant, working on your behalf. He's been strong, and he's been principled. And that's the kind of leader we need right now. That's what we need in the United States Senate. Yes, we can."

"Oh, I checked every place in town, and they were outrageous," Shannon Kelly said. "It would be anywhere from four to five hundred, and I just don't have that right now."

Kelly had just walked into Rent N Roll, a rent-to-own tire store in Ocala, Florida. She was looking to rent a set of tires for her truck. Tire rental stores like this one have been around for a while, but until recently, most of their customers rented fancy rims. These days, it's becoming more common for the stores to rent simple tires to people who don't have the cash to buy tires outright.

Customers like Kelly can walk out of the store with a new set of tires for about $30 — and a promise to make lots more payments in the future. In the long run, some renters wind up paying twice as much for their tires as they would have paid if they'd bought them outright.

Lots of factors have driven more people to rent tires. Tighter credit means fewer people using credit cards to buy tires. Stagnant wages and high unemployment make hard for many people to come up with enough cash to buy new tires. The price of rubber went up a while ago.

And, in 2009, the U.S. imposed a tariff on Chinese tires as part of a trade fight. That drove up the price not only of imported Chinese tires, but also of other tires, which no longer had to compete with the cheap Chinese imports. By the time the tariff was removed last October, the price of imported tires had risen roughly 40 percent. And that rippled all through the tire market.

Even if tire prices start to come back down, the tire rental business isn't going anywhere.

"I understand that I'll probably end up paying a lot," says Lyn Warren, a manager at McDonald's, who just signed up to rent brand new tires for his 2000 Honda. "But right now, I need the tires."

Gov. Rick Perry's outsized Texas swagger is coming to the heart of blue state America.

As part of his ongoing effort to lure new business to the Lone Star State, next week the conservative Republican governor and former presidential candidate is taking his economic development road show to New York and Connecticut — two solidly Democratic states whose politics couldn't be any more different than Texas'.

The visit follows earlier incursions this spring in two other noted Democratic strongholds, Illinois and California, where Perry also preached a low-tax, anti-regulation message that runs counter to the ethos of the dominant local political culture.

So far, Perry's TexasOne team, a coalition of corporations and chambers of commerce, has launched $1 million worth of commercials on blue state TVs, blasting the slogan, "Texas is calling. Your opportunity awaits."

A federal court in New York has ruled that a group of interns at Fox Searchlight Pictures should have been paid for their work on the movie Black Swan. The decision may have broad implications for students looking for their first job.

Eric Glatt filed the federal lawsuit against Fox. He says everyone always told him taking an unpaid internship was the way to get his foot in the door in the film industry.

At Fox, he worked as an unpaid accounting clerk, he says — filing, getting signatures, running checks and handling petty cash — but he was working for nothing.

"All these employers who think if they slap the title intern on the job description, suddenly they don't have to pay for it," he says.

Glatt says this week's court ruling finally bursts what he calls the myth that employers are all offering interns great educational opportunities. "Businesses are not running free schools on their work sites," he says. "What they're doing is getting people to do work that their businesses need done."

Tightening Up Regulation

The Department of Labor has set rules for when internships can be unpaid. Other courts have interpreted them to mean that unpaid interns need to be getting more from the company than the company gets from them.

But this week's ruling goes even further, saying that unpaid internships must have an actual educational component independent of school credits or the job experience.

Juno Turner, Glatt's attorney, says the ruling leaves little wiggle room. "I think that many, many internships fall into the category of wage theft and I think that this decision is a blow to that practice."

Fearing A Negative Impact

Northeastern University law professor Roger Abrams calls the decision "extraordinary." It means the good news for young people is that if you are lucky enough to get an internship, now you are also likely to get paid.

But businesses might decide that interns are not worth the expense. "I think it may have a negative impact on this entranceway into a variety of professions and that's what I would be worried about," Abrams says.

It's a worry shared by 19-year-old Juliana Rordorf, a New York University sophomore interning at a small consulting startup this summer. She says it is exactly the type of workplace that might not bother to hire interns if it had to pay; she says the company doesn't need her as much as she needs them.

"I'm getting great connections, I'm able to actually take on real tasks," Rordorf says. "Even being somewhere on time and having a real responsibility ... and I would be concerned that this would take those opportunities away from other kids, or from me in the future."

Besides, Rordorf says, she's also had bad internships but it's easy to quit an unpaid job.

Promoting Equality In The Workplace

Boston University law professor Michael Harper says the idea is not only to stop the exploitation of young people but also to address the unfair advantage that goes to those who can't afford to work for nothing.

"If you were poor you wouldn't have had that opportunity, so another thing these laws do is provide more equality in the workplace," he says.

Fox declined to comment but released a written statement that says the company is disappointed and plans to appeal a court decision it calls "erroneous."

Mark Jaffe of the New York Chamber of Commerce says the decision is already starting to make waves in the business community. "We know there's a lot of businesses out there taking advantage of the internship situation — free labor — but the gig is up. You can't get away with it anymore; somebody's watching and you cannot abuse certain situations," he says.

For his part, former intern Glatt is hoping to move on to see what he'll get in back pay and damages. Glatt could use the money. He has given up on the movie industry and is now in law school.

"Oh, I checked every place in town, and they were outrageous," Shannon Kelly said. "It would be anywhere from four to five hundred, and I just don't have that right now."

Kelly had just walked into Rent N Roll, a rent-to-own tire store in Ocala, Florida. She was looking to rent a set of tires for her truck. Tire rental stores like this one have been around for a while, but until recently, most of their customers rented fancy rims. These days, it's becoming more common for the stores to rent simple tires to people who don't have the cash to buy tires outright.

Customers like Kelly can walk out of the store with a new set of tires for about $30 — and a promise to make lots more payments in the future. In the long run, some renters wind up paying twice as much for their tires as they would have paid if they'd bought them outright.

Lots of factors have driven more people to rent tires. Tighter credit means fewer people using credit cards to buy tires. Stagnant wages and high unemployment make hard for many people to come up with enough cash to buy new tires. The price of rubber went up a while ago.

And, in 2009, the U.S. imposed a tariff on Chinese tires as part of a trade fight. That drove up the price not only of imported Chinese tires, but also of other tires, which no longer had to compete with the cheap Chinese imports. By the time the tariff was removed last October, the price of imported tires had risen roughly 40 percent. And that rippled all through the tire market.

Even if tire prices start to come back down, the tire rental business isn't going anywhere.

"I understand that I'll probably end up paying a lot," says Lyn Warren, a manager at McDonald's, who just signed up to rent brand new tires for his 2000 Honda. "But right now, I need the tires."

The quintessential American superhero — the one who forged the genre — returns to the multiplex this weekend: Superman. The latest big-screen iteration, called Man of Steel, explores the birth of the character (played as an adult by British actor Henry Cavill), delving into why he came to Earth, into his inner conflicts growing up, and into how he resolves them.

And more than perhaps any other big-screen version of the story, Man of Steel lingers on the wrenching death throes of Superman's homeworld — the distant planet Krypton, where his natural father (Russell Crowe) and mother work desperately not just to save their son, but to save their species.

"I have a reverence for that mythology," says director Zack Snyder, who admits to being "a slight dork" about such things. "And I really wanted to treat the experience of seeing Superman born [with care]. ... And that ancient technology ... I find fun to think about. ... Within that world, it was fun to see Jor-El putting his son into the basket and [metaphorically] sending him down the river."

Snyder joined NPR's Linda Wertheimer to talk casting choices, cutting the film down to size, and why this version of the character doesn't wear his shorts on the outside.

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There's no single reason for the decline of bees, suggests More Than Honey director Markus Imhoof, whose family has kept the honey-producing apians for generations. The filmmaker hails from the Swiss Alps, where flowers, fruit, honey and bees exist in synchrony, with only low-tech human intervention. Even there, however, diseases and parasites are devastating hives.

Things are worse in China, where Mao's war on birds shattered the natural order, and in the U.S., where industrial-scale beekeeping and the indiscriminate use of pesticides has fueled the phenomenon known as "colony collapse."

The film's first stop is California, which produces as much as 90 percent of the world's almonds. The trees require the ministrations of untold numbers of bees, whose hives are trucked to the orchards by the hundreds on huge flatbeds, by companies whose insects also pollinate other crops throughout the country. The stresses of travel kill bees, sometimes by the millions. Fungicides and varroa mites also undermine colony health.

Imhoof's visit to China is brief, probably because bad news about its food supply is not encouraged by that nation's censors. Then it's off to Australia, the only continent whose bees have not been infested by the varroa mite. There, bee researchers (including the director's daughter) are working on a disease-resistant breed. The last stop is Arizona, where one honey harvester believes that the hardier Africanized (aka "killer") bee is American agriculture's great yellow-and-black hope.

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Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a strong warning to the protesters camped out at Taksim Square in Istanbul.

He said that within 24 hours, the situation at the square would be resolved. As The New York Times reports, the tough talk was tempered with an olive branch of sorts: Erdogan hinted that a referendum could decide whether a mall would be built in place of a park next to the square.

As we've reported, a small peaceful protest against the redevelopment kicked off the largest anti-government protests in recent memory.

The Times adds:

"'We have not responded to punches with punches. From now on security forces will respond differently,' Mr. Erdogan said on Wednesday. 'This issue will be over in 24 hours.'

"Mr. Erdogan reiterated and sharpened that warning in a speech on Thursday morning.

"'Using a Molotov cocktail is a crime, burning and destroying is a crime, destroying public order is a crime,' he said in his televised statement, in reference to protesters who set barriers around Gezi Park to block police interference. 'These cannot be called a struggle for freedom, struggle for rights.'"

NPR correspondent Joseph Shapiro and his daughter Eva spent the weekend at the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Eva, 15, won the "Best in Grade" award, one of two for ninth-grade writers, for a short story. She takes writing classes with Writopia Lab in Washington, D.C.

Excerpts Of Award-Winning Teen Writing

Bad Candy, by Janay Alexandrea Crane (Walkerton, Ind.)

Habibi, by Samantha West (Boise, Idaho)

Grandpanomics, by Anthony Desantis (Greenville, S.C.)

If you want to observe one of Washington's most delicate balancing acts, look no further than President Obama's effort to assert leadership on immigration legislation without its coming to be identified as a new Obamalaw.

Because they're keenly aware of how nearly any legislative effort that becomes known as the president's baby almost immediately makes his political foes hellbent on stopping it and denying him a victory, Obama and other White House officials have been committed to letting Congress take the lead on major legislation like immigration reform.

His challenge is to show just enough presidential leadership on an issue he campaigned on but not so much that he fires up those opposed to him on general principle, the Senate immigration legislation or both.

That's why, at a Tuesday event at the White House, he seemed to be using a style used to describe his approach to Libya — leading from behind. The president emphasized that the legislation the Senate is considering isn't his but the Senate's. True, he supports much that's in it. But he was speaking not as an author of the legislation, but as a fan.

With a bipartisan array of allies of an immigration overhaul behind him in the White House East Room, representing business, organized labor and immigrant-rights activists, the president said:

"So there's no reason Congress can't get this done by the end of the summer. Remember, the process that led to this bill was open and inclusive. For months the bipartisan Gang of Eight looked at every issue, reconciled competing ideas, built a compromise that works. Then the Judiciary Committee held numerous hearings. More than a hundred amendments were added, often with bipartisan support. And the good news is every day that goes by, more and more Republicans and Democrats are coming out to support this common-sense immigration reform bill.

"And I'm sure the bill will go through a few more changes in the weeks to come. But this much is clear: If you genuinely believe we need to fix our broken immigration system, there's no good reason to stand in the way of this bill."

The president could have added, as he has in the past on other issues, that his support for the bill shouldn't be reason to oppose it, but why state the obvious?

By now, Obama has plenty of experience with that balancing act.

On gun control, an issue precipitated by December's Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, a shocked and angry nation compelled him to take charge on the issue, which he did with Vice President Biden's task force and its wide-ranging recommendations.

But the realities of gun politics — and the fears Obama evokes for many gun owners who believe he wants their guns — argued against a gun-control effort spearheaded by him. So he got behind the more narrow and ultimately unsuccessful background-check legislation championed by Republican Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Democratic Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

By the end of the sequester fight, Obama also had taken a back seat to Congress, preferring as the deadline approached to use his bully pulpit to warn Americans of the difficulties the cuts would bring instead of negotiating with congressional Republicans.

Even as he seeks to keep his political adversaries from blocking his priorities, Obama is still capable of mocking them. On Tuesday, he appeared to do just that while subtly raising the possibility that race might be a factor in resistance to the current crop of immigrants.

"The notion that somehow those who came through Ellis Island had all their papers right" (long laughter from the audience) "you know, had — had — had checked every box and followed procedures as they were getting on that boat — they were looking for a better life, just like these families."

In the end, if an immigration bill finally becomes law, Obama will be able to take some credit. After all, he did win re-election by campaigning on fixing the nation's broken immigration system. And, of course, there would be the instantly historic photos of him signing the legislation.

But he doesn't want too much credit, at least not right now.

"Medellin has undergone a transformation in the last few years, what we call a metamorphosis because of its dimensions," said Mayor Anibal Gaviria. "All this in 20 or 25 years. We went from being the most violent city in the world to today being in the top 25."

The city built new, modern schools and futuristic libraries. There were new parks, complete with bike lanes and public squares. But the most famous innovation has been the use of gondolas and ski lifts to move tens of thousands of people each day, connecting them to a modern metro.

The city also found another way for residents to get around in neighborhoods built on mountainsides: an escalator that rises up the Comuna 13 district, taking residents 1,300 feet up toward their homes.

Astrid Ramirez, age 38, is among those who gush about the investments. She lives in a district that used to take an hour to get to, riding a bus along narrow streets that rose up into the mountains. Now, she spends a quiet few minutes riding above it all in a cable car.

"It's very good because it saves time from the traffic jams and it also saves money because you can ride really far for very little money," she said.

'Still Worried'

But despite the improvements to mass transit, Ramirez expresses concern about crime.

"On the theme of security, here in Medellin?" she said, frowning. "In all of Medellin? I think it's bad. There are too many gangs that want to take over the neighborhoods."

Indeed, Luis Fernando Quijano, an expert on crime and gangs, says that Medellin remains a dangerous city.

There are still warring drug traffickers, he says. He also talks of people who went missing and are likely dead, and the 9,000 residents who were forced from their homes last year because of crime.

"I'm still worried," he said.

Quijano said that extortion of small businesses remains serious, and that witnesses are afraid to talk to the police because of what street hoods might do to them.

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NPR's Uri Berliner is taking $5,000 of his own savings and putting it to work. Though he's no financial whiz or guru, he's exploring different types of investments — alternatives that may fare better than staying in a savings account that's not keeping up with inflation.

Reckless bets on real estate can cause trouble. They can, for example, help to bring down the global economy. But many financial advisers say including some real estate in an investment or retirement portfolio is a good idea. It adds diversification.

And real estate prices are rising. Here's one way to tell: The house-flipping shows are back on cable. Buy, remodel, sell, repeat. We've been there before, and it didn't end happily. And yet prices fell so hard during the crash — 50 percent or more in some parts of the country — that a rebound just makes sense. Real estate watchers are divided on whether fundamentals justify further price increases or whether the market is getting too frothy again.

Josh Dorkin runs a real estate investment website called Bigger Pockets. I asked him what kind of real estate bet I can make for $1,000. His advice: Be careful.

"We're kind of in a bubble once again," he says. "We've got these low interest rates; we've got the big money funds coming into the market. And of course if you're savvy and know what you're doing, there's always going to be an opportunity."

Dorkin runs me through my options.

"You could go and flip a house. Of course, you'd need to go out and take out a high-risk loan more likely than not to do that and of course doing that is really kind of like running a job in itself."

Range of REITs

Curious about some of Uri's other REIT holdings?

Storage units: When the housing market picks up, people move more often. They need someplace to stash their stuff for a while. They want more space, and they rent it from storage unit companies that are REITs.

Data centers: Data centers are like unfurnished apartments for digital information. They're secure and climate controlled with plenty of reliable power. With more companies using the cloud, demand for these digital apartments is growing.

Parents steer their kids to media for all kinds of things: as a distraction so they can make dinner, to teach letters and numbers, and for pure entertainment. There are also times when parents rely on books, TV, museums and other media when they aren't quite sure how to approach a difficult topic by themselves.

Linda Ellerbee is the queen of hard subjects. Domestic abuse, Sept. 11, alcoholism and living with HIV are among the many tough issues she's covered in the 22 years since she's hosted NickNews on Nickelodeon. The show is written for 9- to 13-year-olds, and Ellerbee says her one rule of thumb is don't dumb it down.

"Our viewers are smart people," she says. "They are merely younger, less experienced and shorter." They also possess a more limited vocabulary, but Ellerbee she still uses words they might not know, like "intervention" or "hijacking."

"If I'm going to use a word that I think a 10-year-old might not understand," she says, "I either explain what the word means or use it in such a way that it's absolutely clear what the word means. I don't change the word."

NickNews is also known for letting kids do the talking: Children who've experienced all kinds of difficulties go on air to explain what their lives are like and how they're coping. Ellerbee says it's an effective way to explain a hard subject to young people. But, she cautions, don't do it too soon.

"That's why we haven't gone to Newtown yet to do a show with those kids or, you know, about what happened," she says. "It's about timing. You need to sort of let some things settle."

For the producers of Glee, meanwhile, the right time was four months after Newtown. Last April, the Fox series did an episode in which the high school goes on lockdown when a student's gun goes off. Some Newtown, Conn., residents urged people in the community to boycott the show.

“ The way adolescent brain works is such that 'bad things happen to other people' ... So what I think ['Glee'] did was to strike empathy and understanding amongst that age group.

A federal appeals court slapped down a quixotic legal campaign against Monsanto's biotech patents this week.

Organic farmers had gone to court to declare those patents invalid. The farmers, according to their lawyers, were "forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement" if their field became contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed.

Instead, the judges — echoing the ruling of a lower court — told the farmers that they were imagining a threat that doesn't exist.

"There is no justiciable case or controversy," they wrote. Monsanto says that it won't sue anyone for accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops, and the organic farmers couldn't come up with any cases in which this had happened.

The organic farmers, however, declared partial victory, because the court's decision binds Monsanto to this promise. Up to now, it was just a statement on the company's website. Now, it's enshrined in the legal record.

In fact, according to the judges, since the decision to reject the organic farmers' claims relies explicitly on Monsanto's policy statements, "those representations are binding."

The reason is something called "judicial estoppel" — the common-law principle that someone can't use an argument to win one case and then turn around and argue the opposite in a different case.

The day we arrived in Iran's capital, Tehran, billboards along the drive from the airport to the city center were already telling us something about what's happening in the country as it prepared for Friday's presidential elections.

We see typical highway signs for Sony Ericsson, but also billboards featuring the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. We also see and drive under giant signs that are from Iran's current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging people to vote.

Iran's supreme leader has predicted his country will produce an "epic" turnout, a big endorsement of the Islamic Republic.

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The Baltic city of Tallinn hardly looks modern with its blend of medieval towers and Soviet-era architecture. Smoke-spewing buses and noisy streetcars look as if they have been plucked from the past.

Even so, the Estonian capital is one of the world's most technologically advanced cities. The birthplace of Skype has repeatedly been cited for its digital accomplishments. Last week, Tallinn once again made the short list of the world's most intelligent cities as selected by the Intelligent Community Forum.

Talinn residents depend on the Internet for just about everything, and automation is the rule. Riding the bus is free, but requires a "smart card" that you wave over an onboard sensor pad that allows central transit authorities to track your movements.

Mailing a package requires senders to use their cell phone to request a code from the electronic post office downtown. The code opens a locker to start the package on its journey.

City parking is another digital adventure. Journalist Gustaf Antell says it starts with a text message to an electronic parking authority.

"I think everybody in the city knows the number to the parking service – One nine zero two," he explains. "Then I put my car's number, and then I also write the code" for the parking lot.

The fee appears on his monthly cell phone bill, which he pays electronically.

Estonians are also required to carry chip-embedded identification cards. Without the card, residents don't officially exist in Estonia. The cards are used for voting, prescriptions and most other transactions, all done online.

Working Toward Better Government

Many Estonians appear to embrace their digital dependence. It's a trend that began after Estonia broke away from the Soviet Union two decades ago.

Officials say they had to create an "e-government."

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As Russia prepares to host the world for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, it faces a number of challenges: The weather is mild for winter sports; residents are complaining about being displaced; and the project is costing a huge amount of money.

Yet the Black Sea resort town, a favorite of President Vladimir Putin, is bustling with construction cranes. Workers are racing to complete high-rise hotels and state-of-the-art venues for figure skating, speedskating and hockey.

Officials are brushing aside questions about the costs, while Olympstroy, the Russian state corporation that oversees the project, is proud to show off its crown jewels, such as the Bolshoy Ice Dome, a gleaming new stadium for hockey.

The roof resembles a giant beetle shell, fashioned from thousands of glass panels that change colors at night. Inside, members of the builders' public relations team point out the venue's 12,000 seats and its luxury boxes for dignitaries.

The guide notes that the venue has already been tested, with ice hockey matches and a full-scale ice show.

Over at the Adler Arena, two giant Zambonis take a stately turn around the speed-skating oval.

In the center of the track, the building director describes the technical ingenuity that's required to maintain perfect racing for ice and spectator comfort in a subtropical climate that's nearly at sea level.

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I'm surrounded here at NPR Books by people with sophisticated, grown-up tastes — happy to dive into the latest Claire Messud or Daniel Alarcon or James Salter. Meanwhile, give me — any day — a book about teenagers (and preferably dragons). A good YA novel is a polished gem of solid storytelling, but more than that, it draws us back in time to the teenagers we once were — or never were, or wanted desperately to be. Here are five (well, really six) books that capture the roller coaster of adolescent experience: that delicate thump in the gut when you realize that suddenly a friendship is more than a friendship. Or the rock-solid conviction that YOU are the chosen one, the heroine of your own drama (whether or not you want to be). Or just that all-over twitchy feeling, lying on the living-room couch and staring out the window, of longing for your real life to begin.

If you've experienced sticker shock shopping for ground beef or steak recently, be prepared for an entire summer of high beef prices.

Multi-year droughts in states that produce most of the country's beef cattle have driven up costs to historic highs. Last year, ranchers culled deep into their herds – some even liquidated all their cattle – which pushed the U.S. cattle herd to its lowest point since the 1950s.

And dry conditions this summer could cause the herd to dwindle even further. That means beef prices may continue on a steady climb, just in time for grilling season.

At Edwards Meats in Wheat Ridge, Colo., near Denver, workers divvy up the bright red ground beef into trays, sliding one into a glass display case. A laminated price tag is the final touch. Recently, the number on that slip of paper has been getting higher.

"In the last three weeks, it has really jumped," says owner Darin Edwards. "Most of our prices have gone up at least a dollar a pound or more."

Price increases are commonplace when people start firing up their backyard grills, but Edwards says this year is different. Prices for certain cuts of beef have jumped to all-time highs.

"Sometimes you throw a couple big, thick T-Bone steaks up on the scale and it's 30, 40 bucks and [customers are] like, 'Yeah, I can't afford those,'" Edwards sayx.

And it's not just T-Bones. The same story goes for New York strips, tenderloins and ribeyes.

Even with the higher prices. Edwards is absorbing some of the cost. That's not something he can keep up for long.

"If it doesn't come back down in the next couple of weeks, we'll have to adjust our prices accordingly," he says. "We just kind of bite the bullet for a little bit."

So why are prices going up? Simply put, here just isn't enough feed. Because of the drought that has been battering much of Midwest cattle country for more than a year, there's a smaller supply of hay and dense grasses. Ranchers are having a tough time finding feed and when they do, it's more expensive.

During the winter, Gerald Schreiber, whose ranch is Last Chance, Colo., paid more than double what he usually does for hay. He usually maintains a herd of 250 cattle, but last year he prematurely sold more than 30 of his animals, unable to justify the high feed prices. With hindsight, he said he should've culled even deeper. A combination of drought, wildfire and wind transformed Schreiber's pastures into a blanket of invasive, noxious weeds. The fields haven't recovered.

"This is pretty unpredictable country," Schreiber says. "We deal with drought a lot. You got to get the rose-colored glasses off."

Recent research shows more than half of the country's beef cattle are in states where the pasture can't support large herds.

"A rancher has to make a decision," says Elaine Johnson, a market analyst with Cattlehedging.com. "Do I buy expensive hay and try to hang on for another year? Or do I just liquidate my cows? Tighter and tighter supplies means higher and higher prices."

Those higher prices mean more people could choose to forgo burgers and steaks this summer. Sales of beef have been down so far this year, while less-expensive options, like pork, are up. Johnson says consumers can expect to pay more for beef as long as dry conditions persist across the high plains.

"When you have a drought like this and have liquidated numbers significantly, it typically means that supplies are going to be reduced for two, three, four years, and it's one of the reasons why we've seen such a big increase in beef prices," Johnson says.

Most economists agree and expect prices to stay high the rest of the year. Until ranchers can build up their herds, the family barbecue will put a bigger dent in the pocketbook.

Luke Runyon reports from Colorado for KUNC and Harvest Public Media, a public radio reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food production issues. A version of this post appeared earlier on the Harvest Public Media website.

Forms of gonorrhea that don't respond to the last line of antibiotics have rapidly spread in Great Britain, expanding the reach of drug-resistant disease.

The number of gonorrhea cases with decreased sensitivity to the front-line drug cefixime increased by nearly six times from 2004 to 2011 in England and Wales, a team from the U.K.'s Health Protection Agency reported Tuesday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a growing trend worldwide, with cases rising in Asia, North America and Europe. Japan has even documented a superresistant strain of gonorrhea that can thwart all available drugs.

Sixty years ago, doctors had a large arsenal against gonorrhea, including penicillin, ampicillin, tetracycline and doxycycline. But one by one, each of those antibiotics stopped working. Now there are only two drugs left: cefixime, which is taken orally, and ceftriaxone, which is injected into muscle.

Last summer, evidence emerged that cefixime had stopped working against gonorrhea in the U.S. The data were so worrisome that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sounded the alarm and issued new guidelines for treating the sexually transmitted disease. Then in January, Canada documented the first case of cefixime-resistant gonorrhea.

Gonorrhea, aka "the clap," is the second-most-common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S., with more than 300,000 cases reported in 2011.

In the current study, epidemiologists tested drug sensitivity for more than 7,000 gonorrhea cases in England and Wales. Strains that showed signs of resisting cefixime steadily increased from 2004 to 2010, when 17 percent of cases didn't respond to normal doses of the medication. This percentage then fell to 10.8 in 2011.

The gonorrhea cases that didn't respond well to cefixime also showed resistance to ceftriaxone.

These two drugs are in the same class of antibiotics. So many scientists worry that once the bacterium conquers one of them, it will eventually knock out the other, too.

The world doesn't have any backup treatments for gonorrhea. Once this class of antibiotics is gone, we've got a big problem.

I'm surrounded here at NPR Books by people with sophisticated, grown-up tastes — happy to dive into the latest Claire Messud or Daniel Alarcon or James Salter. Meanwhile, give me — any day — a book about teenagers (and preferably dragons). A good YA novel is a polished gem of solid storytelling, but more than that, it draws us back in time to the teenagers we once were — or never were, or wanted desperately to be. Here are five (well, really six) books that capture the roller coaster of adolescent experience: that delicate thump in the gut when you realize that suddenly a friendship is more than a friendship. Or the rock-solid conviction that YOU are the chosen one, the heroine of your own drama (whether or not you want to be). Or just that all-over twitchy feeling, lying on the living-room couch and staring out the window, of longing for your real life to begin.

The sad thing about this week's ScuttleButton puzzle is that Edward Snowden has already revealed the answer.

ScuttleButton, of course, is that once-a-week waste of time exercise in which each Tuesday or Wednesday I put up a vertical display of buttons on this site. Your job is to simply take one word (or concept) per button, add 'em up, and, hopefully, you will arrive at a famous name or a familiar expression. (And seriously, by familiar, I mean it's something that more than one person on Earth would recognize.)

For years, a correct answer chosen at random would get his or her name posted in this column, an incredible honor in itself. Now the stakes are even higher. Thanks to the efforts of the folks at Talk of the Nation, that person also hears their name mentioned on the Wednesday show (by me) and receives a Political Junkie t-shirt in the bargain. Is this a great country or what?

You can't use the comments box at the bottom of the page for your answer. Send submission (plus your name and city/state — you won't win without that) to politicaljunkie@npr.org.

(Why do people keep forgetting to include their name and city/state?)

And, by adding your name to the Political Junkie mailing list, you will be among the first on your block to receive notice about the column and the puzzle. Sign up at politicaljunkie@npr.org. Or you can make sure to get an automatic RSS feed whenever a new Junkie post goes up by clicking here.

Good luck!

By the way, I always announce the winner on Wednesday's Junkie segment on TOTN — seven or eight days after the puzzle first goes up. So you should try and get your answer in as soon as possible. But logistically, you have about a week to submit your guess.

Here are the buttons used and the answer to last week's puzzle.

Re-elect Nixon in '72 — President Nixon carried 49 states against Democratic challenger George McGovern.

Member/Kennedy for President Club — Sen. Ted Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980.

Senator D Huddleston — Not sure, but this could be from the Kentucky Democrat who served from 1973-84.

Praise Allah — The Islam prayer (officially, "Praise be to Allah").

picture button of the Three Stooges' Mo Howard — I soitenly had to include this one.

So, when you combine Re + Member + D + Allah + Mo, you may just very well end up with ...

Remember the Alamo! The famous expression travelers use when looking for a car rental at the airport.

The winner, chosen completely at random, is Jackie Kennedy of Paducah, Ky. Yes, that Jackie Kennedy. She gets not only the coveted Political Junkie t-shirt — but the Official No Prize Button as well!

NPR Morning Edition Host Steve Inskeep recently traveled to Damascus for a series of reports on the ongoing war in Syria. He sent this postcard from the road.

Dear Salt:

On my first day in Damascus, I went walking in the ancient bazaar — narrow stone-paved streets surrounding a great stone mosque. The mosque is so old, it used to be a church during the Roman Empire, and before it was a church, it was a pagan temple. The bazaar is surely as old as the mosque, for Damascus is a historic city of trade.

My colleague Nishant Dahiya directed me toward an incredible aroma he'd detected at the door of a spice shop. I bent down and sniffed the gray stuff. It was oregano. It filled a bag about the size of a five-gallon gas can. The smell was strong but not hot, rich but sharp. The shopkeeper, noting my appreciation, grabbed a scoop and put a little on my hand to taste.

Some days later, we were exceedingly hungry while driving on a highway outside Homs. Our driver, Neda, pulled over at a roadside stand. "They have za'atar," she said. Nishant knew exactly what she meant. I'd never heard the word.

Three men lounged on plastic chairs at the stand, which was right by the highway median, in a clearing in the bushes. One worked a black baking oven. I never found out what the other two did. A glass case held several of the round, flat Middle Eastern flatbreads called khubs. Some were smeared with cheese; some with a paprika sauce; and some with za'atar. I chose the latter two, and the man shoved them into the hot coal oven with a paddle — the way an Italian cook might insert a pizza.

The paddle was one of only two special utensils the cook used. The other utensil was a common tree saw, with an orange handle, absolutely identical to the one in my storage closet at home. I presume he used the saw to hack down roadside trees to feed the fire.

When the bread emerged, I smelled an incredible aroma that I knew I had experienced somewhere before. After a moment, the image came to me: Damascus, the bazaar, the great bag of oregano just a few days ago.

"It has other ingredients, too," said Nishant. "Sesame seeds crushed into it." He said it's eaten all over the Middle East.

I immediately wanted to write you about this, Salt, but Nishant discouraged me. He said za'atar is far too common to be interesting. He reacted as if I had proposed to ask you the story behind ketchup. And this made me wonder: what is the story of ketchup?

But I digress. Over the hours that followed, it became apparent that Nishant might just be right. It seemed that I was the only person around who did not know from za'atar. Completely by chance, I heard from a friend in Pakistan who loves it. Then the subject came up over dinner in Damascus, and a friend informed us that when she was growing up, she was urged at school exam time to "Eat your za'atar!" Apparently, some people think it's brain food.

Anyway, the roadside serving of za'atar on bread was an astonishingly simple food, simple enough to love it. The za'atar was just spread over the hot bread like butter on toast. That was it. I'd eat it again. While I wait to encounter it again, Salt, here's what I want to know: Where does za'atar come from? How long has it been around? What, besides oregano, is in it?

And is it brain food?

— Steve

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For the last five years, graduation day has been as much a time for apprehension as for celebration.

Even now, with the Great Recession over, many recent graduates are still struggling to turn their high school and college diplomas into tickets for a better life. The unemployment rate for Americans under age 25 remains more than double the overall rate of 7.5 percent.

But experts are predicting this year's graduates — whether from high school, community college or a four-year college — should have better career launches than at any time since 2008. Companies expect to hire about 2.1 percent more college graduates from the Class of 2013, and will offer a higher overall starting salary of $44,928 — up 5.3 percent over last year, according to the spring survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

If you woke up this morning thinking, "I really need to hear NPR's Linda Wertheimer say the words 'noisily unwrapping her Twizzlers,'" have I got good news for you.

Margot Adler had a story on today's Morning Edition about Broadway audiences and whether they're getting ruder, given recent incidents involving the aforementioned Twizzlers, rude texting, talking, and other interruptions. She went to the TKTS line (where you wait for discount Broadway tickets) and asked some of the folks what they thought.

Some offered the usual explanations — say, that we're all used to sitting in our living rooms watching alone, and we don't remember what it's like to use our polite-company manners anymore. One speculated that as theater has gotten more casual (less dressy, drinks allowed), people's behavior has lost its polite formality.

Jan Simpson, the writer of one blog about Broadway, actually calls herself "old-fashioned" for wanting people to sit quietly while watching a show, which I can tell you caused the writer of one blog about popular culture to clutch her metaphorical pearls in horror at the thought that there's something modern about being a disruptive buffoon. Adler acknowledges that in fact, "in Shakespeare's time, they threw food on the stage." Of course, in Shakespeare's time, they died of various things we've cured, so let's not embrace that too eagerly.

What emerges is partly a generational issue setting younger audiences who want to tweet about the show while it's happening (mon dieu!) against older, perhaps more experienced audiences who take a less consumer-oriented and more art-patron-oriented approach to attendance. But surely, a person of any age is capable of doing without Twitter for a couple of hours. I can do without Twitter for a couple of hours, for example, and I've been known to tweet about people clipping their nails on the Metro.

It's a good thing, indeed, to avoid taking theater and making it a cloistered place for elites only (not that ticket prices don't get you a good part of the way there). But it's also a good thing to avoid giving free passes out of Rudeness Jail for everyone who simply prefers not to iron anything except cargo shorts.

Okay, okay, I don't really care if you wear cargo shorts. But the pockets should not be stuffed with things that beep, smoke, smell like garlic, or tempt you to whisper.

Deal?

The Senate voted Monday to approve its version of the farm bill, a massive spending measure that covers everything from food stamps to crop insurance and sets the nation's farm policy for the next five years.

The centerpiece of that policy is an expanded crop insurance program, designed to protect farmers from losses, that some say amounts to a highly subsidized gift to agribusiness. That debate is set to continue as the House plans to take up its version of the bill this month.

For farmer Scott Neufeld, crop insurance is an integral part of his family's business. When the wind whips through his farm in northwestern Oklahoma, the wheat sways and looks like a roiling ocean — those famous amber waves of grain.

"It's normal," says Neufeld, looking toward a tree blowing in the wind. "They're predicting storms today, so that wind you hear is pumping up the moisture for the storms."

Says Morales: "We have been waiting for things to change, like the laws. But we realize we cannot put our lives on hold."

They are among an estimated 36,000 binational, same-sex couples in the U.S., says Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality; nearly half of them have children. A recent effort by the advocacy group and others to include spousal sponsorship language in an immigration bill being considered by the Senate failed.

That has made the Supreme Court decision all the more consequential, Ralls said.

Unless the high court strikes down DOMA, or the Senate reconsiders what to include in its immigration bill, Morales will have to leave the country when she finishes her master's in nursing program at Georgetown University. Or she could join the ranks of those in the U.S. illegally.

That's not something the couple wants. They've contemplated a move to either Peru, where Morales has family, but also would not recognize their marriage, or to a country like Canada, where their marriage would be legal under federal law.

But relocation is not something that the almost relentlessly positive couple dwells on.

"We always say that everything happens for a reason," says Costello, who teaches English as a second language to elementary school children in a suburban Washington school district. "That's kind of our motto."

Their Story

The women joke that when they met in Washington at a mutual friend's party seven years ago it was love at first sight.

"These have been the happiest years of my life," Morales said in the sun room of Kelly's parents' home, where they have been living.

Morales was working in Miami when they met, employed as a bank IT project manager and in the country on a work visa. She moved to Washington to be with Costello, obtaining a student visa that allowed her to get an undergraduate degree in nursing from Georgetown, and pursue her master's degree.

"She's my best friend, she's the love of my life," Morales says of Costello. "We knew that we were going to be together forever — always together, we could do anything, and guided by God."

The women say they are sustained in times of vulnerability, including Morales' struggle with multiple sclerosis, by family and their strong Catholic faith. They attend Mass weekly at a nearby church, and a priest gave a blessing at their wedding.

They wear matching gold St. Christopher medals on necklaces, and pray together daily.

"We understand that the Catholic Church maybe still has to change a little bit more to love everybody, like people like us," Morales says. "But we have found support from the Catholic Church. Not everybody is against gay people."

Costello, who says she has become more devout since meeting Morales, adds: "As my Dad always says, we are all God's children."

The families of both women have embraced the couple, including Kelly's 83-year-old aunt, Deirdre Krouse.

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If you opt for the upgrade, changes are coming to your iPhone experience this fall. And if you want to shell out some cash right away, the latest line of MacBook Air computers boasts a lot more power and battery life, and the machines are available to ship today.

Apple chiefs announced their latest products and improvements Monday as part of the keynote at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

We kept an eye on the two-hour presentation so you didn't have to. The highlights:

iOS 7 Changes Include Improvements To Siri

Apple CEO Tim Cook calls the new iOS 7 the "biggest change" to Apple's mobile operating system since the introduction of the iPhone six years ago. The new operating system offers 10 new features, including multitasking for all apps and background updates, and it strips away the old look in favor of flatter design. The Verge reports:

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Are you old enough to remember privacy?

Teens and even young adults have grown up in an environment where sharing information about themselves online is not just encouraged but expected.

Yet there's a disconnect between the attitudes young people express about online privacy and their actual behavior.

A Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Monday showed Americans ages 18-29 place a higher priority on privacy than any other age group. Among them, 45 percent say it is more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats. That view falls to 35 percent among those ages 30-49 and just 27 percent among those ages 50 and older.

But the poll, taken amid last week's revelations of the government tracking of phone calls and Internet activity, also found that just 12 percent of people ages 18-29 are following the story very closely, compared with a majority who aren't paying attention at all.

No matter what they tell pollsters, young people are used to sharing private information online. Still, it may not be the case that they're so markedly different from those who came of age in the 20th century.

They may have grown up as digital natives, but the behavior for which they're sometimes criticized — sharing too much information online — is more and more the practice among older generations, as well.

"We shouldn't assume that young adults are just idiotic about privacy," says Joseph Turow, a communication professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Products Of The Times

It's not hard to find people in their 70s and 80s who don't want to do everything online. Some don't trust online banking, for example, out of fear that carrying out financial transactions on the Web could make them more vulnerable to identity theft (or just plain theft).

Teens and college students, meanwhile, seem to think nothing of posting pictures of themselves clad scantily, if at all, or engaging in inappropriate behavior.

But those types of online behaviors, while receiving plenty of media attention, may be overblown as a picture of a generation.

Young people have always done stupid things. It's just that now, Turow points out, they can do them online, for all the world to see.

Old people, he says, may know better than to display pictures of their bodies on the Internet. But he notes there haven't been studies of those over, say, 55, to examine what sort of odd things they post.

And there's no telling whether today's older generations would have acted just as brazenly as kids do today, if Twitter and Snapchat had been around in their youth.

Conversely, young people, "as they mature, both financially and physically, may be more like their parents over time," Turow says.

Trust, Don't Verify

Turow has conducted surveys since the 1990s that have looked at people's attitudes about online privacy, including how the young differ from those who are more mature.

When it comes to questions such as whether they've ever put off an online purchase owing to privacy or security concerns, or whether their friends should ask permission before posting a recognizable picture of them on the Internet, the attitudes of young people are pretty much in line with older folk.

"They may do things they regret, but in the context of asking them about policy, they're not all that different from older people," Turow says.

That's in part because older people have, for the most part, gotten more with the times when it comes to living online.

Whether you're young or old, if you're reading this online article it's likely that you've pushed away concerns about privacy at one time or another, because you wanted or needed the convenience of conducting transactions that have largely migrated onto the Internet.

"Privacy is not an on/off switch — it's more like a spectrum," says Mary Madden, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "We make various choices in various situations, depending on perceived risks and benefits."

And much of the growth of the Web, and certainly social media, has coincided with post-Sept. 11 security concerns.

What Privacy Policy?

Madden was lead author of a recent report about teens and social media. It found that only 9 percent of teens were "very" concerned about third parties, such as advertisers, gaining access to their online information, compared with nearly half their parents.

Because children and adolescents often exercise poor judgment, about half of parents try to place some kind of controls on their children's Internet use, according to the Pew study. In 1998, Congress passed a law requiring website operators that collect data from children under the age of 13 to comply with privacy policies.

But the whole idea of privacy policies is a misnomer, at least in terms of people's expectations. In survey after survey, Turow says, huge majorities of Americans mistakenly believe that a website having a privacy policy means they're entitled to privacy — that their information won't be shared or sold. That's just not the case in most instances, even though some sort of protections may be in place.

"The great majority of Americans, when they see the words 'privacy policy,' are deluded, they're misled," he says.

Not only are generic terms failing to keep up with the times, but it's in the interest of social media companies and retailers alike to sound reassuring so that people will share as much information about themselves as possible.

Don't worry, so many sites seem to say. We'll protect you.

Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University, suggests it may be that current news coverage about the government's use of data may foster greater awareness of the extent of online data collection in general — by drug companies, political campaigns and seemingly everyone else.

"Social networks have given young people an illusion they can control their privacy," Montgomery says. "Most young people don't understand the extent of the data collection that happens on all these sites."

Most people don't take the time to do all they can to protect their information online. The current stories about the National Security Agency could bring about more concern about privacy — that is, if enough people are paying attention.

But it might foster a general sense that it's already too late to worry much about it.

Even if you're careful about what you share online, after all, your friends might not practice the same discretion.

"You can be a non-Internet user and you're still all over the Web," says Madden, the Pew researcher. "It's not quite possible to be completely offline anymore."

The Sandwich Monday crew is out of the office today, at a staff retreat where they're probably going to make us exercise. Still, here's a quick take on a new sandwich from one of our favorite spots.

The arrival of a new sandwich at Tudor's Biscuit World in West Virginia is a lot like that scene in The Lion King: Somebody takes the biscuit to the edge of a cliff and holds it out for all of Appalachia to behold, and all the animals rejoice, except the animals who end up on the biscuit.

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"Thanks for the inspiration @ASmith83 & @Sllambe - I'll take it from here... #tweetsfromhillary"

Retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores' annual shareholders' meeting this week showed signs of the company's recent turbulence, as protesters assembled at corporate headquarters to shout slogans and demands.

Despite a court-issued restraining order, the protesters, including workers who are on strike, decried low wages and called for better safety procedures for supply-chain workers. And some of their views were heard inside the meeting, as well.

The strikers were in Bentonville, Ark., with the support of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and the labor group OUR Walmart.

Inside the meeting, the lineup of speakers included "former Bangladesh child garment worker turned activist Kalpona Akter, as Jacqueline Froelich reports for Newscast, from Arkansas member station KUAF.

Akter took the stage to deliver a speech recommending the adoption of Proposal No. 5, a measure that would give shareholders of 10 percent of common stock the ability to call a special meeting. Such meetings would be useful, she said, in crafting responses to incidents such as the recent collapse of the the Rana Plaza garment factory complex, which killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh.

After that tragedy, several large European clothing companies said they will band together to create a program for inspecting factories and ensuring safety upgrades to protect workers. Last month, Wal-Mart said it would not be part of that effort, preferring instead to create its own plan, as The Two Way reported.

That didn't satisfy Akter, who noted that repairs that would make the company's factories safer had been deemed too expensive, despite equaling "just two tenths of 1 percent of the company's profit last year."

"Forgive me, but for years every time there's a tragedy Wal-Mart officials have made promises to improve the terrible conditions in my country's garment factories, yet the tragedies continue," Akter said. "With all due respect, the time for empty promises is over."

Wal-Mart employs more than 2 million people around the world, according to the company. It generated sales of around $466 billion in fiscal year 2013. Friday, Wal-Mart executives unveiled a plan to buy back $15 billion in stock.

Despite appearances by celebrities Hugh Jackman, Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Tom Cruise, Wal-Mart's 2013 meeting brought serious concerns along with the company's celebration.

"This year's shareholders' meeting comes at a time of turmoil for the world's largest retailer, which finds itself dealing with empty shelves, labor unrest, bribery scandals and tumbling sales," as Daily Finance reports.

Two things jumped out at me when I visited the show "Encyclopedic Palace" at the Central Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. The first is that in a show that claims, according to the wall text, to "initiate an inquiry into the many ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience of the world," the work on display is openly indifferent to anything that might be called knowledge, science or learning. Instead the exhibition is a disturbing celebration of the work of mystics and self-styled visionaries.

On display are sance induced abstractions by Hilma of Klints, images from Jung's Red Book, Aleister Crowley's tarot cards, blackboard doodles from Rudolph Steiner and Guo Fengyi's Chi-Gong visions, among much else.

Is this the curator's idea of a good joke? In the age of climate-change deniers and unreasoned skepticism about human origins, I don't find it very funny.

Or could it be, is it just possible, that from the playful heights of the art world, the very difference between seeing and knowing, on the one hand, and fantasies of communication with sages on the astral plane, on the other, has become too difficult to make out?

The second thing that jumped out at me when I visited the Central Pavilion was the near absence of art.

There is a great deal that is of interest and value, to be sure. For example, the wonderful models of imagined buildings — 387 of them! — that Austrian artist Oliver Croy found in a junk shop in Vienna; or the thrilling collection of pictures made by a Russian tween, most likely for the purposes of his own onanistic pleasure. But these are stand-alones, one-offs, the private products of isolated individuals. They are not so much art as they are art's raw materials.

Art happens in community, in exchange with others, in participation with the ideas and work of others who share common questions, puzzles, fascinations.

I wonder whether the curator's indifference to knowledge and science is also what explains his apparent indifference to art.

Art and science are different, to be sure. But they have a common origin in our joint engagement with a shared reality; and each thrives only in the crucible of community. Where there is no knowledge, there can be no art. And where there is no art, there is not even the desire for knowledge.

A final note: there are a few works of bona fide art on display in the Central Pavilion. For example, there is Tino Sehgal's wonderful installation (discussed here last week), and there are also striking works by Tacita Dean, Ellen Altfest and Artur Zmijewski. For the most part, though, the show does not even try to target art.

It should also go without saying that these critical remarks about the show in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini are not intended to apply to the work in the different national pavilions. There is magnificent art at this year's Biennale. I especially recommend the work at the French, British and Romanian Pavilions.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama

Running time: 115 minutes

Not rated: smoking

With: Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azema, Denis Podalydes, Anne Consigny, Michel Piccoli

In French with subtitles

NPR's Bob Mondello reads an excerpt of one of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. He reads Beyond the Fence by Matthew Campbell of Salem, Mass. You can read the full story below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

The love of his life had been married for five years before he met her, and dead for five days before he'd found out. Clandestine lovers weren't notified in the event of a tragedy. The police and medical examiners had waited days before releasing the names of those killed in the concert fire to the public.

The paper had published profiles of the victims, and that's where, halfway through his usual breakfast of a slice of toast and a banana, the news had found him.

The funeral had been yesterday, but, of course, he hadn't gone. How could he look at her husband, and her children, and explain away the grief that had become as much a part of his face as his nose?

Instead, he'd come to say goodbye on the same grass she'd died on. He wasn't alone. Shrines ringed the police barricade. Flowers, pictures and candles were woven into the temporary steel fence, the flotsam of a tide of communal sorrow.

As he looked now at the lawn, it was hard to imagine how anyone could have been crushed in such a wide open space, but the fire on stage had been fierce and thousands of people had packed the event.

It had been a country concert, of course.

"You know what you get if you play country music backwards?" he'd asked.

It had been a day as beautiful as today, with sunlight streaming across their bodies as they lay on a hotel bed and listened to an old song she'd just put on. Cash? George Jones? He'd have to look it up. Funny how he wanted to remember everything now, even that.

"That's such an old joke," she'd said.

He'd finished it anyway. "You get your wife back, your house back, your dog back ..."

She'd pushed him softly, "Stop it, you're making fun of me."

"Seriously, why do you like this stuff?" he'd said.

"Because it tells a story," she'd said. "Each song has its own life, they create their own reality."

"Yeah, but it's a depressing reality," he'd said. "Life's messy," she'd said and kissed him.

As he stood in front of one of the shrines, he saw something glint in the grass, just beyond the fence. He carefully stepped over the guttered candles and reached his fingers through the mesh of wire and pictures to dig after the glint that was smashed into the grass. It was an earring, gold with small stones, long and dangling.

He'd never seen it before.

She'd have liked it.

They'd never given each other anything, every trace of their relationship had to be hidden: text messages deleted, evenings accounted for with plausible alibis, clothes washed to remove cloying traces of foreign scents. His only picture of her was the one that had accompanied her profile in the paper. The only footprints left by the passing of their love were in his mind, and he could already feel their edges eroding.

Without his really deciding on it, the earring became hers. He could see her wearing it, smiling at him across a table or from the other side of a rental car. He'd given it to her, and now he'd found it again.

This one small thing would bear evidence to their love, to its existence. Like her country songs, he'd create his own reality.

"Life's messy," he thought, as he turned away.

Interview Highlights

On when he first watched The Quiet Man

"Gosh, I was probably 7 or 8 years old. I grew up way out in the country in Illinois, and it was very exciting in the early '80s when we got a VCR. We were not a wealthy family, we never did get cable, but we did own five video cassettes and The Quiet Man was one of them. It was my dad's favorite, and it quickly became mine. It's very nostalgic for me."

On what makes the movie different than your typical romance

"It's a rather tempestuous love story, you know, there are fists flying as equally as kisses being planted."

On how the film and John Wayne influenced him

"I was a very big fan of John Wayne as a kid, and my dad and I would watch a lot of movies on Sundays — on WGN, on television — and even though I ended up having a little more of a sense of humor than the Duke, I like to think that I sort of maintain a rugged edifice in the service of authoritarian types."

I was standing in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, where there's a full-sized Egyptian temple, called Dendur. It's housed under a glass roof ...

But here at the Met, looking for names, I suddenly saw something that made me stop short. "Oh," I thought. "This is very bad luck."

There, sitting right next to a carved Egyptian figure, an obviously important official — straight in his line of sight — was a graffito from someone named "L. Brad—" (couldn't read the rest of it) who added "of NY US." The date was 1821. The "2" doesn't look like a "2," but it is.

The man was so beautiful. He appeared to be stepping out of the ad on the side of the bus, his hair illuminated in sun. Amelia saw the little slip of paper burst from his pocket when he pulled out his keys. It flipped in the air once, twice before it caught against the cement stairs right in front of her. She quickly shut her mailbox with the very tiny key that made her feel oversized and fumbling.

Carefully, so as not to rustle it, she pushed open the heavy metal door of the apartment complex and snatched up the piece of paper between two pale fingers. She looked down the street in the direction that he had gone, but the faces, the heads, the clothing — it was already all wrong.

The paper read:

Milk
Bread
Pomelo

"This is what he needs," she said to herself, softly. She ran her thumb over the last word, smudging the pencil a little.

Pomelo? She lifted her head and said the word slowly, her mouth moving as a fish blowing bubbles, "Pomelo? Pomelo?"

She hurriedly walked three, four blocks and entered the grocery store with its frozen, scent-less air.

She stood in the entryway, the automatic doors saying whoosh, whoosh as people funneled in around her.

"Can I help you?" asked someone in an apron. She could not tell if it was a man or a woman.

"Pomelo?" she said, but it came deflated and not how she practiced.

"Pomelos. Over there," the person said, and pointed at a bin of luminous green fruit, so large and round. A bin of discarded planets, lost without their moons. Amelia needed both hands to pick one up and this made her smile. She placed it back on the pile very gently. Then she turned around and left.

In later years, during the moments of greatest darkness, she would clutch the battered list to her chest and whisper soothing words to herself, "Pomelos are real. I am real. Pomelos are real. I am real."

Says Morales: "We have been waiting for things to change, like the laws. But we realize we cannot put our lives on hold."

They are among an estimated 36,000 binational, same-sex couples in the U.S., says Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality; nearly half of them have children. A recent effort by the advocacy group and others to include spousal sponsorship language in an immigration bill being considered by the Senate failed.

That has made the Supreme Court decision all the more consequential, Ralls said.

Unless the high court strikes down DOMA, or the Senate reconsiders what to include in its immigration bill, Morales will have to leave the country when she finishes her master's in nursing program at Georgetown University. Or she could join the ranks of those in the U.S. illegally.

That's not something the couple wants. They've contemplated a move to either Peru, where Morales has family, but also would not recognize their marriage, or to a country like Canada, where their marriage would be legal under federal law.

But relocation is not something that the almost relentlessly positive couple dwells on.

"We always say that everything happens for a reason," says Costello, who teaches English as a second language to elementary school children in a suburban Washington school district. "That's kind of our motto."

Their Story

The women joke that when they met in Washington at a mutual friend's party seven years ago it was love at first sight.

"These have been the happiest years of my life," Morales said in the sun room of Kelly's parents' home, where they have been living.

Morales was working in Miami when they met, employed as a bank IT project manager and in the country on a work visa. She moved to Washington to be with Costello, obtaining a student visa that allowed her to get an undergraduate degree in nursing from Georgetown, and pursue her master's degree.

"She's my best friend, she's the love of my life," Morales says of Costello. "We knew that we were going to be together forever — always together, we could do anything, and guided by God."

The women say they are sustained in times of vulnerability, including Morales' struggle with multiple sclerosis, by family and their strong Catholic faith. They attend Mass weekly at a nearby church, and a priest gave a blessing at their wedding.

They wear matching gold St. Christopher medals on necklaces, and pray together daily.

"We understand that the Catholic Church maybe still has to change a little bit more to love everybody, like people like us," Morales says. "But we have found support from the Catholic Church. Not everybody is against gay people."

Costello, who says she has become more devout since meeting Morales, adds: "As my Dad always says, we are all God's children."

The families of both women have embraced the couple, including Kelly's 83-year-old aunt, Deirdre Krouse.

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In June 2012, Nik Wallenda — of the great Wallenda Family circus dynasty — walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. On June 23, he plans to cross the Grand Canyon the same way. Wallenda has also recently written a memoir called Balance: Christian Faith and Miraculous Results.

Wallenda's job requires great precision and care. Other people's jobs? Not so much. We've invited Wallenda to play a game called "Whoops!" Three examples of extreme clumsiness, stupidity or both, taken from an annual compilation of odd workers' comp claims put together by lawyer Thomas Robinson.

And a battalion of workers is involved in a highly choreographed backstage ballet, not just to keep the actors looking good but to help them change costumes almost instantaneously.

Two and a half hours before the actors and acrobats of the Broadway revival of Pippin take the stage, the costume department is already busy at work deep in the bowels of the Music Box Theatre — sewing, washing, hanging up costumes, putting clothes and shoes into baskets. Wardrobe supervisor Meghan Carsella says the costumes at Pippin take quite a beating.

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I have substantial affection for both Hollywood Reporter TV critic Tim Goodman and the Fox executive who tweets as "Masked Scheduler." They're both amusing, resolute grumps at times, but great fun to follow on Twitter. So you can imagine how uncomfortable it was to see them have a testy exchange about the new episodes of Arrested Development (which, remember, was on Fox and is now not). Tim liked them, and was reacting to early criticism of the first couple of episodes.

He reminded people that there were many episodes to come that they hadn't watched yet: "The structure is clearly important to new AD, just as Hurwitz said. So let it all unfold each episode and don't worry about just one or two."

I immediately knew people were going to ask exactly the same question raised by Masked Scheduler, who said, "Wait a second Tim don't you p*** all over series after an episode or two rather than letting them unfold?" He hashtagged it "#doublestandard."

Tim went on to explain that he reviewed what the networks gave him, which is usually very little. But in this case, critics had all 15 and could therefore think about all 15. Tim said some things, Masked said some things ... as Kate Aurthur later wrote about at Buzzfeed, the entire Arrested Development situation didn't make anybody look great — not even show creator Mitch Hurwitz.

And it's too bad, because the conversation that Tim and MS were starting to have before it got heated was actually a great one, and it raises an issue that's going to come back and back and back: Is reviewing a dump of 15 episodes released all at once different from reviewing a single pilot sent out by a network? How is it different? If you know there will be 15 episodes but you've only seen one, does it matter whether you've only chosen to watch one or you've only been sent one? Does it affect the validity of your judgment? Does it just reflect how much effort you're putting in?

See, for me, they're both right. The fact that there are 15 Arrested Development episodes absolutely means that judging the entire series by the pilot is incomplete at best. And if we understand that that makes a review imperfect, or at least limited, then Tim is right that a critic who can wait until she's seen more of it come up with a more meaningful set of observations. But MS is right, too, that going by one episode is what we very often do.

Not always — cable networks, in particular, sometimes send out four or six episodes, or even an entire season, before a new show starts airing. Sometimes that leads critics to counsel patience, and sometimes it has the opposite effect: had HBO sent out one episode of The Newsroom instead of four, it almost surely would have gotten better reviews.

But this conversation reinforces the baseline fallibility of any review of a pilot as a stand-in for a review of a show. The show will ultimately be whatever the total run of episodes is — maybe four, maybe 13, maybe 100, maybe more than that. But a review of the pilot is just a review of the pilot. It can be honest, fair, objective, open-hearted, well worth reading, and not at all reflective of what the show has the capacity to later become. That doesn't make it unfair, it just makes it ... a review of the pilot.

It's not meaningless to review a pilot; sometimes, a pilot's aspirations are so low and its imagination so limited that it's clear nothing good is going to happen. That's how I felt about CBS's Partners last year, and NBC's Guys With Kids. Even if they became what they aspired to be, they'd have stunk — even if they were finger-quotes "successful," they'd have been awful. Plenty of pilots broadcast that they are being made without energy, without effort, without love, and without hope. Plenty of them beg from the beginning to be put out of their artless misery. When your pilot is terrible, it certainly affects the odds that your show will also be terrible. It just doesn't conclude the inquiry.

Compare that to something like Fox's New Girl, which was (for me) wildly out of balance in the first season: Jess (Zooey Deschanel) was too dumb, too inept, too emptily quirky to work as a character. But there were elements that were promising, and what it wanted to be was something smart and odd. That show in the early going wasn't working creatively (despite good ratings) but it seemed possible that if it worked better, it might become a good show, which it eventually did. I never changed my mind about the pilot; I'd say the same thing about it again if I saw it again. But as was the case with The Big Bang Theory, while the pilot remained unsuccessful forever (seriously, that pilot is awful), the show got better at what it was trying to do.

I talked to a comedy showrunner about this once, and he told me that even a terrible comedy will be a better terrible comedy after it's been on for a while. Things shift; that's why I tend to be tentative about comedy especially.

It would be disingenuous for networks to tell critics that it's unfair to reach conclusions about shows based on pilots, since that's a huge part of how networks pick shows. Obviously, the network knows more than the critic does about what's planned and has more to go on, but it's unfair to embrace an early conclusion that a pilot is good (consider the positive reactions to the pilot of Smash) and holler about an early conclusion that a pilot is bad. Good reviewing, to me, is not a matter of not reaching any opinion at all, but about being confident enough to let it shift without resistance.

Tim is also right that the way networks function, they encourage judgment-by-pilot by sending out pilots only. You send more, critics will see more. If you don't think the pilots mean anything out of context about where the show is going, stop showing them to people out of context. Show them in context. Show four. Show eight. Show whatever you have. Give people a chance to see the show the way you want it seen, and they're more likely to see it that way.

At the same time, if you've only seen one, understand that where that show will be in ten episodes will almost surely be different. Better, worse, more about this character and less about that one — it will almost surely be different. And for me, that's worth noting and building into my sense of my own limits and the limits of what I'm doing.

But if in fact television continues moving toward on-demand environments and more shows are released on the AD model, it's not going to be possible for everybody to watch everything before they say anything. Readers are curious; writers are eager; deadlines are merciless. Partly for creative reasons and partly for business reasons, it's not worthwhile to debate whether we should undertake a system in which nobody says anything about any show until they can move past reaction and thought all the way to drawing a conclusion about the entire show after it's had the full opportunity to expand to the edges of the creator's brain, because it ain't happening. It hasn't been happening for a long time — judging episodes as they arrive is what episode recaps are, and it's why they're satisfyingly fast and ultimately limited. And it's what audiences are doing, too. You can try telling an audience that sampling a show means watching it for at least ten episodes, but "good luck with that" doesn't begin to capture how hopeless that would be.

There's no point in bemoaning the imperfection of a pilot review as a piece of criticism, and no point in defending it as a logical necessity that's often the best of several flawed choices: it's both. What matters is circumscribing conclusions so that they don't seem to be more than they are. What we've seen is what we can judge, and the possibility that we'll change our minds later is why reviewing episodic television, which is a living moving shifting thing, is hard. And great.

For the first time in two years, delegations from North and South Korea sat down for talks aimed at ratcheting down escalating tensions on the peninsula.

The meeting took place at the symbolically significant border village of Panmunjom, where nearly 60 years ago the two sides signed an armistice ending the Korean War.

As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports, the discussions were focused on procedural issues in advance of a planned ministerial-level meeting as well as discussions on reviving a joint industrial zone and facilitating reunions of families separated by the Korean War, both of which have been suspended amid growing unease between Seoul and Pyongyang.

A South Korean spokesman told reporters Saturday that the talks had gone smoothly, "without any agreement" and the South Korean news Yonhap news agency reported that the two sides would meet again in Seoul on Wednesday.

As the BBC reports:

"Ties between the two Koreas deteriorated earlier this year in the wake of the North's nuclear test on 12 February.

Pyongyang withdrew its workers from the Kaesong joint commercial zone in April, apparently angered by tightened UN sanctions in the wake of the nuclear test and annual South Korea-US military drills.

The zone, seen as a symbol of North-South co-operation, had run successfully just inside North Korea for more than eight years.

Around 53,000 North Korean workers are employed at the Kaesong factory complex by more than 120 South Korean factories.

The zone is a key source of revenue for the North and the biggest contributor to inter-Korean trade."