Most Recent Posts

Ebola is threatening to reverse years of educational progress in West Africa. The virus has kept school closed for months in a part of the world where literacy rates are low and school systems are only now recovering from years of civil war.

In Liberia, many children have been put to work while schools are closed, and Ebola is hurting the economy, says Laurent Duvillier, a communication specialist at UNICEF. The fear now, he says, is that many of these children will never return to school.

i i

Linda Barrolle-Saygbe says her two adolescent daughters study for two hours each day while schools are closed. But Barrolle-Saygbe is frustrated that the girls' career aspirations have been put on hold. Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR

Linda Barrolle-Saygbe says her two adolescent daughters study for two hours each day while schools are closed. But Barrolle-Saygbe is frustrated that the girls' career aspirations have been put on hold.

Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR

The risk is especially high for girls, who until recently received much less schooling than boys, Duvillier says. "Families may be tempted to keep the eldest girl at home to help them or to wash clothes for the neighbors," he says. "We don't want those girls to drop out of school because of Ebola."

The school closures have been a challenge even for families with the resources to supervise and educate their children on their own.

Linda Barrolle-Saygbe, who works for the Liberian Ministry of Justice, wanted to hire a tutor to work with her two daughters and other children who live in her compound about an hour from Monrovia. She abandoned the idea because of a government ban on gatherings of people — and because of her own fears that the classes might put her daughters at risk of getting Ebola.

Instead, Barrolle-Saygbe and her husband are having the girls study for two hours a day. "They don't go out," she says. "The only place we go is church."

"It's very sad," says Barrolle-Saygbe's daughter Sharon, who is 18 and would have been a high school senior this year. The school closures will delay her plans to go to college and study information technology, she says.

Goats and Soda

Ebola Is Keeping Kids From Getting Vaccinated In Liberia

Goats and Soda

Ebola In Church: A Reverend's Quarantine Spreads The Word

Sharon's younger sister Issabelle, who is 12 and wants to be a journalist, says she misses her teachers and friends and "having fun."

Closing schools was probably necessary to stop the spread of Rbola, Barrolle-Saygbe says. But she worries now that her daughters could lose an entire year of education. "The time is too long. And if they are not doing anything, they will fall way, way back," she says.

Children from less affluent families face much more serious risks, Duvillier says. "The kids play everywhere," he says. "We don't know where they go. They're roaming and actually it's increasing the risk [of Ebola] because we never know if they may enter the home and not wash their hands."

The longer schools in West Africa remain closed, the greater the risk that kids will drop out. But schools can't reopen until they are sure students will be safe from Ebola, Duvillier says. That means training teachers how to prevent infections and installing hand-washing stations at the entrance of every school. Both of those simple requirements represent "a very big logistical challenge," Duvillier says, and could take weeks or months.

During Liberia's civil war, which ended in 2003, some children missed years of school. And literacy rates plummeted. The challenge now is to make sure Ebola does not have a similar effect, Duvillier says.

ebola

Education

Liberia

Global Health

On racial tensions he faced in the Los Angeles Philharmonic

Most people were fine ... I do remember meeting a concert pianist and he says he almost fainted when he saw me sitting there. He says, "You're so starkly black [against all the orchestra's white faces], there you were in the LA Philharmonic." ...

I had a nickname ... Boston Blackie. No one had ever called me that personally but many people came to tell me that that's how I was referred to.

And then there was a Chinese guy, very young, came up to me and he said, "Welcome. Bob, now that you're here, try and get as many black people where you are." He says, "That's how things change." And he became my first friend in the orchestra.

On what he wants people to take away from the book

One of the things that I think ... we're not honest enough about is, we tell young people that, "You can do anything you want, just put your mind to it." But that lofty paradigm defaults to: "You can do anything if we're comfortable with it."

In my hometown people would say things like, "You wanna play French horn, I see. Have you seen anyone else doing it?" I said, "No." ... That was the mentality in my hometown. If it's different, right away, you're going to get resistance.

Or, in the case of my father, it was fear. Because my father, I found out just before I went to conservatory, that he actually auditioned for Juilliard. He bolted out of the audition because he ... could play bands, he could read Souza marches and he could play in the jazz band, but ... he wasn't classically trained trumpet. So it created a fear and a stigma, so when I come along a generation later saying, "I want to play French horn," he thought, "You think they're gonna take you? You'll see."

Read an excerpt of The Black Horn

classical music

french horn

African-Americans

race

From award-winning Broadway performances to the iconic voice that brought Darth Vader to life, James Earl Jones has an unmistakable presence on stage and on screen.

He's 83 years old and back on Broadway, where he stars in the comedy classic You Can't Take It With You.

The play takes place in the midst of the Great Depression — a time when Jones himself was growing up in Mississippi and rural Michigan.

“ I didn't want to talk — bad enough that I just gave up. I couldn't introduce myself to people who visited the house, and it was too painful.

- James Earl Jones

He was close to his grandparents, who eventually adopted him, but he developed a stutter and remained quiet for much of his childhood.

"You know, I've told that story so much. I'm so fascinated by it because I don't understand it," Jones says. "I didn't want to talk — bad enough that I just gave up. I couldn't introduce myself to people who visited the house, and it was too painful."

Jones says he is still a stutterer.

"I don't say I was 'cured,' " he says. "I just work with it."

He likens it to his days on the family farm.

"Being raised as a farm kid, it was all about making do," Jones says. "Putting one foot in front of the other. You had to plow a field, you just put the horse in the row and you got behind the plow and you did [one] row at a time. And eventually you got it done — one foot in front of the other. And you take up a profession in this business, you got to accept that there's a certain journeyman stage to it.

“ You take up a profession in this business, you got to accept that there's a certain journeyman stage to it. For me, it never ends. I'm still a journeyman actor ... it's one foot in front of the other."

- James Earl Jones

"For me, it never ends. I'm still a journeyman actor. But you're on a journey — and it's one foot in front of the other."

Jones' journey to the stage had lots of unexpected turns. He wasn't always set on acting.

"I loved the army, I almost stayed in the army," he says. "I was pre-med in college and couldn't handle that. I considered being a priest at one point — I'm glad I didn't do that."

When he finally did decide on theater, he says it was difficult setting time aside to perform. So to free up his days, he took on a night job as a janitor.

"I cleaned a lot of toilets," Jones says. "Some of the most famous off-Broadway theaters you can imagine, I washed the toilets in those places. I polished those toilets shiny."

When Jones is asked to share the story behind his big break, he hesitates.

"My big break, good Lord, what a title," he says. "Oh, I wouldn't like to say that. That puts down all the other things I've done that ... maybe really were my big breaks."

i i

Muhammad Ali (right) takes on James Earl Jones in the ring. When this photo was captured in 1969, Jones was making the film The Great White Hope and Ali dropped by to help drum up publicity. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Muhammad Ali (right) takes on James Earl Jones in the ring. When this photo was captured in 1969, Jones was making the film The Great White Hope and Ali dropped by to help drum up publicity.

AP

But he relents: "Oh yeah, I'll say it," he says. "My big break was The Great White Hope," a play that premiered in 1967 and hit Broadway a year later.

Jones played the main character, Jack Jefferson (modeled after Jack Johnson), a champion boxer fighting racism both in and out of the ring.

In 1969, he won the Tony Award for Best Actor for the role. The story was later adapted into a movie, which he also starred in.

"The Great White Hope put me on the cover of Newsweek magazine," he says. "One day that week, somebody noticed you."

He says that role changed his life.

"I decided if I can handle a leading role in a Broadway play, then I can probably go ahead and get married and raise a family," Jones says. "I could afford to raise a family."

i i

At 83 years old, James Earl Jones is back on Broadway. He stars in the award-winning classic You Can't Take It With You, now playing at the Longacre Theatre. Joan Marcus/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Joan Marcus/AP

At 83 years old, James Earl Jones is back on Broadway. He stars in the award-winning classic You Can't Take It With You, now playing at the Longacre Theatre.

Joan Marcus/AP

At this point in his career, Jones says he's overwhelmed by the opportunities he's had and all of the people he's worked with over the years.

"There was nobody [who was] supposed to be well-known in our family," he says. "That was not supposed to happen. Something odd about it.

"I think I'm very fortunate that I can earn a living doing something that I really find enjoyable. I'd like to keep doing it. And there's some plays I'd like to do still, some characters I'd like to explore, and there's always good actors to work with."

broadway

Darth Vader

James Earl Jones

David Edwards has been called a real-life Willy Wonka. The biomedical engineer has developed, among other things, inhalable chocolate, ice cream spheres in edible wrappers, and a device called the "oPhone," which can transmit and receive odors.

Edwards is based at Harvard, but much of his work has been done in Paris, at a facility he calls Le Laboratoire. Now he's opened a similar "culture lab" closer to home: Le Laboratoire Cambridge in Cambridge, Mass.

“ By opening the creative process up to the public it leads to a better understanding of how the world's changing, and why it's actually thrilling that it is.

- David Edwards

Cultural Research And Development

"Many of the questions that we face today — questions of innovation, of change — are not really questions we can deal with in a classical science lab," Edwards says. "And I think that's why culture labs are showing up increasingly around the world. By opening the creative process up to the public, it leads to a better understanding of how the world's changing, and why it's actually thrilling that it is."

Edwards has been inviting scientists, designers, composers, artists and chefs to collaborate on projects the public can experience as the work develops.

This open lab, a kind of cultural research and development effort, grew out of Edwards' earlier work: The biomedical engineer helped pioneer aerosol prescription drug delivery systems for patients with diseases like Parkinson's. After selling his company, Edwards applied the technology and the profits to chocolate delivery, calling it Le Whif.

The Salt

The Vaportini: A Cocktail Inhaled, Not Stirred

"We've done a lot around 'air food' and other kinds of nutritional experiences that are without calories, that are all-natural, that are portable. And there's no liquid and all kinds of benefits," he says.

Or, instead of nutrition, how about a buzz? After Le Whif came Le Whaf, a machine that turns liquid — quite often alcohol — into fluffy clouds of consumable gas.

An Incubator For Unconventional Innovation

Boston Globe technology columnist Scott Kirsner, who visited Edwards at the Laboratoire in Paris, says, "People come in off the street and say, 'What exactly is this? Can I buy something here?' "

Edwards takes great delight in explaining the concepts to visitors, Kirsner says. "I think he kind of does have that enjoyment of — you can't really put your finger on what is he trying to do and what is the point of it, exactly."

The Salt

Move Over, Dippin' Dots: 5 Futuristic Ice Creams

What's the point? Well, Wikifoods, little spheres of ice cream, yogurt or cheese wrapped in edible packing, are meant to cut down on landfill waste. In the U.S., Edwards is collaborating with the dairy company Stonyfield Farms to get "Frozen Yogurt Pearls" onto the shelves at Whole Foods.

Kirsner thinks the Laboratoire fills a void in a landscape loaded with incubators trying to create the next Facebook or Twitter.

"If he's creating a place where you can develop a new food product, or, you know, spawn some new nonprofit or some new cultural group, that's an interesting incubator to me," Kirsner says. "Because it's not just saying, 'Let's just create new public companies that are gonna be worth billions.' It's saying, you know, 'Let's create healthier foods that maybe could be distributed without refrigeration in the developing world, and let's do cultural innovation.' And not a lot of people are saying that.

Where Our Senses Can Take Us

The lab in Cambridge is also collaborating with MIT's Dalai Lama Center and a cartilage expert to explore how sound and vibration affect our minds and bodies.

i i

The "oRb" vibrates in your hands as you sing. It's one of the projects under development at Le Laboratoire, Cambridge. Andrea Shea/WBUR hide caption

itoggle caption Andrea Shea/WBUR

The "oRb" vibrates in your hands as you sing. It's one of the projects under development at Le Laboratoire, Cambridge.

Andrea Shea/WBUR

One piece is called "Vocal Vibrations." Composer and MIT Media Lab professor Todd Machover says it invites Laboratoire visitors to sing and feel their voices vibrating through an egg-shaped "oRb."

"The sense is, 'Oh my gosh, I'm holding my voice in my hands,' " he says.

"It's exciting to have a place like Le Laboratoire, where they're willing to think about where different senses can take us and what happens if you combine them," Machover says.

Which brings us to the oPhone, a little device that transmits and receives "aroma messages." Chef Patrick Campbell collaborated with Edwards to concoct scents based on the dishes he's created for Le Laboratoire's restaurant. But the no-nonsense chef admits he was skeptical.

"The idea of someone sending, essentially, my dish across the ocean instantaneously, and there's three people in a Parisian coffee shop smelling my cavatelli or whatever it is, is a very interesting concept," Campbell says.

Like a lot of the concepts in the Laboratoire, the oPhone is a work in progress. But Edwards hopes visitors will test it out — and even help his team of researchers come up with some more practical applications.