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Mary Beth Heffernan shows Dr. Jerry Brown his image on the back of a camera. Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Mary Beth Heffernan shows Dr. Jerry Brown his image on the back of a camera.

Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

How often does this happen: You're listening to a news story describing some problem halfway around the world and you say to yourself, "I know how to fix that!" It's not your area of expertise. It's not a place you know. But you are sure that if you went there you could solve the problem.

Los Angeles artist Mary Beth Heffernan is the rare person who decided to actually give it a try. Last summer, Heffernan, who is also an art professor at Occidental College, became obsessed with Ebola — particularly the images of the health care workers in those protective suits, or PPE as they're called for short.

"They looked completely menacing," says Heffernan. "I mean they really made people look almost like storm troopers. I imagined what would it be like to be a patient? To not see a person's face for days on end?"

And what really got Heffernan is that as far as she could tell, there was an easy fix.

"I found myself almost saying out loud, 'Why don't they put photos on the outside of the PPE? Why don't they just put photos on?!'"

Here was her idea: Snap a photo of the health worker with a big smile on their face. Hook up the camera to a portable printer and print out a stack of copies on large stickers. Then every time the worker puts on a set of PPE they can slap one of their pictures on their chest, and their patients can get a sense of the warm, friendly human underneath the suit.

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"It's not a sophisticated response," she says. "It's almost stupidly simple."

Anyone could do this, she thought. And then she thought, I should do this.

The timing was good. She had a sabbatical coming up and a $5,000 grant to work on an art project. She decided to use the money to get her photo kits to West Africa. This would be her art project.

I had to ask Heffernan: How is this art?

She explains: "This is in the spirit of social sculpture. This is part of that history of making art that's about action, about changing society."

Soon Heffernan's kitchen table was piled high with printers to test and applications for more funding. But her biggest challenge was connecting to the people who run Ebola treatment centers.

She reached out to 75 people. And in mid-January, one of her emails reached a key official in Liberia: Dr. Moses Massaquoi, the Ebola case manager for the country.

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Mary Beth Heffernan photographs health care worker Martha Lyne Freeman. Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Mary Beth Heffernan photographs health care worker Martha Lyne Freeman.

Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Massaquoi says Heffernan wasn't the first person to write him pitching some untested scheme. In fact, it was getting to be kind of a pain.

"We've had tons of emails!" he says. "And I was like, 'Can you just stop writing me emails?'"

But Massaquoi says Heffernan's proposal stood out. He'd worked in Ebola wards and the photos made so much sense. He wrote back immediately.

Within a month Heffernan and a colleague were on a plane to Liberia's capital, lugging 12 enormous boxes of supplies.

"Some guy that was on our flight actually looked at me and said, 'Are you moving here?!'" she recalls, laughing.

Right away they ran into snags. It was like a crash course in what can go wrong when people in one country try to dream up solutions for people in another.

For instance, the electrical adapters that Heffernan had planned on using weren't the right kind. Three printers blew up.

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Mary Beth Heffernan prints photos at the Ebola treatment unit. Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Mary Beth Heffernan prints photos at the Ebola treatment unit.

Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

At the first Ebola treatment center she worked with, the staff liked the photo stickers so much they kept walking off with them. "Some brought them home and put them on their refrigerator and their child's backpack. There was another who put the labels all over his car."

It turned out that the staff had been doing really dangerous, really grueling work for months — at times without getting paid. And photos aren't easy to come by in Liberia. So sticker pictures seemed like a rare perk.

Heffernan realized that in the future, she should bring regular photo paper along with the stickers, so everyone can be given a proper photo take home.

For all the hiccups, ultimately the project did start working. Jennifer Giovanni is head of infection control at a treatment center in a rural part of Liberia. She says the photos have made a huge difference — and not only for the patients.

"I feel like I'm working now with other human beings instead of, I almost want to say, like white monsters or white zombies or something."

As for Heffernan, she's back in Los Angeles — and working on bringing more photo kits to Sierra Leone.

PPE

ebola

Liberia

A year after Sept. 11, actor Adam Driver joined the Marine Corps. He was working odd jobs, selling vacuum cleaners and paying rent to live in his parents' house — and he says, like many other Americans, he felt a sense of patriotism and he wanted retribution.

"I wanted to 'test my manhood' and serve my country and just get even and ... get away from home and everything I didn't like about it," Driver tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "In retrospect, it was actually pretty great."

After suffering from a mountain biking injury, Driver, who now stars in the film comedy While We're Young, had to go on limited duty and decided to pursue acting. Now that his movie career is taking off, Driver says he sees similarities between the military and acting: Each person is part of a group trying to accomplish a mission that's greater than themselves.

"The discipline, the self-maintenance, the comradery — they're so similar," Driver says. "I don't view acting as such a radical departure from the military."

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Driver is best known for his role as Hannah's boyfriend on the HBO series Girls. Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of HBO hide caption

itoggle caption Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of HBO

Driver is best known for his role as Hannah's boyfriend on the HBO series Girls.

Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of HBO

Driver has significant roles in the next Star Wars film and Martin Scorsese's forthcoming film Silence. In While We're Young, he plays one half of a young couple that befriends a middle-aged husband and wife, played by Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts.

Driver says that whenever he acts, he's hard on himself. "I have a tendency to ... drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I want to change. Everything in me wants to try to make it better and I feel like it's just not a healthy thing."

But he's learning to "surrender as much control as possible."

"I don't think of it as a done, set thing that people watch and may have their opinions about," he says. "I let it be what it is and then try to move on in my mind as soon as possible."

Interview Highlights

On relating more to Stiller's character, a failed documentary filmmaker, than his own character in While We're Young

In a lot of ways I don't really feel ... as connected to my generation or the interconnectedness of my generation, and I feel like there's need for discipline and not having a right answer and not having immediate access to everything. I mean, I'm a total hypocrite because it's not like I don't log onto the Internet or see what's great about social media.

I'm not involved in social media, but for me it just doesn't work. But I just thought there's something honorable [about] a guy [Stiller's character] alone in a room ramming his head against a wall trying to figure out [his artistic] process and being tormented by it and working on it for such a long time.

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On why he doesn't do social media

Maybe it's because I have big thumbs that it's literally hard for me to type things on a phone or a computer. If I had smaller thumbs maybe I would have a different opinion about social media. ... It just takes me a long time to figure out buttons.

On getting cast as Adam on Girls

I was the first person to audition, actually. ... I was doing a play at the time and thought TV was evil and not where I wanted to be or do — I wanted to do theater. But it was HBO and I had done some things with HBO before and I thought that they were different and the storytelling is always so good. My agent convinced me to go in because I was having a real high-horse moment and that's when I met [Girls creator Lena Dunham] and that was kind of it.

On the sex scenes in Girls

I felt pretty good with it, not in a weird — what's the word when people like to get naked — ... exhibitionist way, but more for the story. What Lena was really going after didn't seem exploitative. ... It was very much in line with those characters; it wasn't just graphic sex for the sake of it or just for the sake of being controversial.

On not being deployed to Iraq with his platoon because of a broken sternum from a mountain biking accident

Not going because you did something to yourself and hurt yourself was pretty embarrassing and terrible. I tried to go; I kept loading up on drugs and trying to run and they put me back in my unit and it was fine and then ... [I wore] a 90-pound pack and my chest started to separate so I had to go back on limited duty. ... So I kind of screwed myself in the long run because I wanted to go so much. You're trained to do this job for two years with these people, the idea of not going, someone else going in your place or not being there is not really an easy thing to sit with.

On top of that, getting out and going to acting school and meeting up with those guys later and they're like, "What have you been doing?" I had been like wearing pajamas and pretending to give birth to myself in an acting class. Trying to face up to that is pretty devastating.

"I had really strong judgments about civilians — thought of them as nasty civilians who are just wasting time and not disciplined. And it took me a while to get over that and not be so judgmental."

- Adam Driver, actor

On going from Marine to Juilliard student

[The other students'] ideas of [me], like, "Oh, you're a Marine so obviously you're going to hit somebody at some point and drag [your] knuckles around or something." ... I could feel their apprehension and being scared, and I guess I was apprehensive and scared, too, in a different way.

I had really strong judgments about civilians — thought of them as nasty civilians who are just wasting time and not disciplined. And it took me a while to get over that and not be so judgmental, or calm down. It's a weird thing to turn off when suddenly you're getting into this crazy civilian world where people are wearing their hats indoors and their clothes untucked and [they] wander in a room looking nasty and cleaning crud out of their eyes. I was ready to act and throw all my effort into it.

On how acting and the military are similar

You have a group of people trying to accomplish a mission that's greater than themselves — it's not about one person. ... Everyone has their specific role and you have to know what your role is and when to show up and be there and when to back away. Then you have usually someone leading it, a platoon leader or a director, and sometimes they know what they're doing and sometimes they really don't know what they're doing, and that's frustrating. Obviously the stakes are completely different.

On his appearance

I did look strange as a teenager — very prominent facial features, a big nose, big ears and tiny eyes, very rat-like. ... I had to develop thick skin. God, in the Marine Corps, if you're insecure about anything or you have ... a mole out of place, people will find it, especially in boot camp, and drill it until you're numb to it, I guess in a way. I was lucky, though, because in my platoon there was another guy who also had big ears and the drill instructors noticed him before they did me, so he was Ears No. 1 and I was Ears No. 2.

Ride-sharing service Uber has launched a new service in the Indian capital — for auto rickshaws, the popular three-wheeled vehicles.

#Delhi, you can now request for an Auto through your Uber app and pay for the ride in cash! More info: http://t.co/OaHaOk7aC1 #uberAUTO

— Uber Delhi (@Uber_Delhi) April 9, 2015

The big difference between UberAuto and the ride-sharing service's other offerings worldwide: You pay the autos, as the vehicles are known in in India, only in cash. Fares are set by the state.

"Autos are an iconic and ubiquitous part of the Delhi landscape and we are excited to have them as another option on the Uber platform," Uber said in a statement on its blog.

The city has some 100,000 auto rickshaws on its streets. They are a cheap and convenient way to travel – though residents of the Indian capital – and other Indian cities – often complain about drivers ignoring the actual fares and asking for more.

Riders can use their Uber app to hail the vehicle – and, The Wall Street Journal reports, rate drivers. The paper adds:

"Uber's main domestic competitors, ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.'s Ola, already operates a similar service, known as OlaAuto, in six Indian cities, including Delhi. Last month, Ola also gave its auto passengers the option for cashless travel using an online-payment system. Ola charges a 'convenience fee' of 10 rupees, or about 16 cents, on top of the meter fare."

Uber says it won't charge a booking fee.

Uber ran into trouble in India last year following the rape of a female passenger in an Uber taxi. The company added an SOS button to its app in India following the incident.

Uber

India

Ron Paul stood off to the side Tuesday as his son Rand announced he was running for president.

There was no speaking role for the elder Paul, 79. There was no ceremonial passing of the torch of "liberty."

There wasn't even a hearty thank you or nod to the father's raucous presidential campaigns that laid the groundwork for the son's launch.

"I never could have done any of this without the help of my parents who are here today," Rand Paul said in Louisville, Ky., in the only section of his speech that made allusion to his father. "I'd like you to join me in thanking my mom and dad for all their help and support through the years."

Help and support with politics? Not so much.

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Ron Paul looks on as Rand, a Kentucky senator, arrives for the announcement of his presidential campaign. Carolyn Kaster/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Carolyn Kaster/AP

Ron Paul looks on as Rand, a Kentucky senator, arrives for the announcement of his presidential campaign.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

"With my parents' help," he continued, "I was able to make it through long years of medical training to finally become an eye surgeon."

Before Rand spoke, former Rep. J.C. Watts, a Paul supporter, joked that backstage when Ron heard, "Run, Paul, run," Ron said, "I'm not doing this again."

Ron did always have a sense of humor.

The scene said it all. Despite the energy and enthusiasm the former congressman's most recent two presidential bids created, he'll be sidelined this time. Rand and Ron are said to be close, but Rand is trying to go where his father never could — to find an electorate beyond a narrow, though devoted, base of young, libertarian men. Rand has his sights set higher. And he does not want his candidacy conflated with his father's.

Unfinished Business

Ron, who retired from Congress in 2012, always stood out for his frankness in a talking-points-laden world. But he was always an outsider. "Libertarian" barely fit in the GOP for most of his quarter-century in Washington. He ran unsuccessfully as the Libertarian nominee for president in 1988.

Ron Paul's top 10 finishes by percentage in the 2012 Republican primary race. Due to Virginia's rules, Mitt Romney and Paul were the only two candidates on the ballot. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Ron was a quirky staple of the last two presidential campaigns. In 2008, he finished fourth for the nomination, winning just a few dozen delegates.

That all changed when the Tea Party came along in 2010. Stars were born, from the Palins to the Cruzes. But the Pauls were there from the start. They were at the ascension of the nascent political movement. Suddenly, everything the septuagenarian gadfly with the ironic following of young libertarians was fighting for was going mainstream in the GOP.

The Tea Party was influencing policy and helping the GOP win state and local elections. But even as Ron Paul helped propel the cause with his refreshingly impolitic style, his presidential run, was still regarded as quixotic.

He didn't win a primary or caucus 2012, but his campaign and devout volunteer activist followers were able to engineer a few wins. In addition to several straw poll victories, he won the most delegates in half a dozen states in 2012, including Iowa. He also finished second in New Hampshire and third overall and took home more than 100 delegates.

Then along came Rand.

Passing The Torch

Rand Paul burst on the scene in Kentucky as part of that 2010 Tea Party wave.

"I have a message from the Tea Party," Rand said on the night of his Senate victory, "a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We've come to take our government back."

In the subsequent two years, Rand followed his father to places like the Iowa State Fair. He'd have his hands in his jeans pockets, strolling over the dirt and grass patches like a baseball scout eyeing a prospect others didn't quite recognize.

He would do it differently than his father, inspired by his father, but not the same. He would do it in a way that would try to mainstream libertarianism. "Quixotic" and "quirky" wouldn't be words associated with his campaign.

He also planned to be ready. His father's team always seemed to be riding on momentum, a certain inspirational high. But it was, at times, caught off guard when the digging began. Like the revelation of the newsletters Ron Paul founded that made derogatory remarks about African-Americans and gays. Paul denied any editorial involvement with the newsletters, but they still had his name on them. At the very least, it revealed a certain lack of professionalism in his operation.

Rand, on the other hand, proved he wouldn't let a hit go unchallenged during his 2010 Senate race after his Democratic opponent Jack Conway used allegations from a GQ article in a TV ad, accusing him of tying a woman up and having her bow down before an "Aqua Buddha" during his college days.

Paul wouldn't shake Conway's hand after a contentious debate and called him a "disgrace."

Instead of solely railing against the powers that be, Rand befriended them. There are few more disliked within the Tea Party than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But, unlike Ted Cruz — the braggadocious other senator with Tea Party backing who has already announced for president — Paul formed an alliance with McConnell, the powerful senior senator from his state.

That's despite McConnell's saying in 2014 that establishment Republicans were going to "crush" Tea Party candidates across the country. Nonetheless, Rand endorsed McConnell in his contentious re-election. In turn, McConnell has already endorsed Paul for president in 2016.

A Bigger Goal In Mind

It's the kind of endorsement his father never won, as National Journal put it. Where his father is the idealist, Rand is the savvy pragmatist. Where Ron spoke his mind, regardless of the politics, Rand is more subtle.

Take drugs, for example. Here was Ron Paul talking about heroin during a 2012 Republican presidential debate.

"How many people here would use heroin if it was legal?" Paul boasted, waving his arms, clearly annoyed with the underlying premise of the moderator's question.

Chris Wallace of Fox News had asked, "Are you suggesting that heroin and prostitution are an exercise of liberty?"

Paul continued, "I bet nobody would put their hand up, 'Oh, yes, I need the government to take care of me. I don't want to use heroin, so I need these laws!' "

That is not Rand's style. He hasn't even backed legalization of marijuana.

"I really haven't taken a stand on ... the actual legalization," Rand Paul said last year, "but I'm against the federal government telling them [states] they can't."

For 2016, even if Paul doesn't win the nomination, he hopes his brand of libertarianism can win over a broader swath of the party than his father was able to.

"I have a message," he said Tuesday during his presidential kickoff, pausing for effect. Acute observers would recognize this bookend. "A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We've come to take our country back."

So far, both Pauls — even if one has exited the stage — have already come close to taking their party back.

2016 Presidential Race

Rand Paul

Ron Paul

Republicans