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Much of Brad Bird's Disney sci-fi adventure Tomorrowland is terrific fun, but it's one of the strangest family movies I've seen: Bird's not just making a case for hope, he's making a furious, near-hysterical case against anti-hope.

After a perplexing prologue in which George Clooney in a futuristic suit addresses an unseen audience, Bird flashes back to perhaps the 20th century's most enduring symbol of technological optimism: The 1964 New York World's Fair. Clooney's character, Frank Walker, is a pre-teen science nerd who's demonstrating his semi-functional homemade jetpack to a British scientist called Nix played by Hugh Laurie. Nix belittles Frank, but a young girl named Athena, who appears to be Nix's daughter, secretly slips the boy a World's Fair pin that transports him somewhere fabulous.

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Hugh Laurie is British scientist David Nix in Tomorrowland. Disney hide caption

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Hugh Laurie is British scientist David Nix in Tomorrowland.

Disney

I can't describe where that is because the fun in Tomorrowland comes from being constantly upended. What I can say is that for Bird the '64 fair is utopia. This was an era when kids made rockets in garages out of vacuum cleaner parts; when a clean, cheerful "city of the future" inspired awe instead of cynicism. For Frank, anything seems possible.

Frank is not the movie's protagonist, but it's someone cut from the same cloth. Casey Newton is a present-day Florida teen (played by Britt Robertson) whose dad works for NASA overseeing the dismantling of rockets that will never be used. A budding rocket scientist, she's so outraged by the failure to support the space program, she sends homemade drones to sabotage the equipment —and gets caught. Sprung from jail, she finds in her belongings the same kind of pin that sent Frank on the ride of his life. Every time she touches it, she's in what I'm tempted to call a field of dreams.

It's obvious why both Casey and Frank got that pin: They have imaginations that can't be dampened. Casey's dad poses a riddle that becomes the cornerstone of her worldview, which is, in fact, the film's worldview: You have two wolves, one representing darkness and despair, the other light and hope. Which one lives? Casey knows the answer: "The one you feed."

After Casey joins forces with the middle-aged Frank, much of Tomorrowland is time-and-space jumping plus blast-'em-up battles with human-looking robots. But the most vivid thing is the message: a critique of films, books and TV shows in which floods, plagues, robots, or nukes wipe out civilization. It's not that Bird is disparaging climate change or other dangers. He's saying our society has become so comfortable with the vision of apocalypse that we're not dreaming up solutions.

Maybe Bird's right and we are too comfortable — even turned on — by plague/flood/road-warrior/kids-killing-kids movies. But Tomorrowland has a weird side, too. Bird has acknowledged the influence of Ayn Rand's militant individualism, and so the enemies he identifies aren't, say, the people causing climate change. They're the doomsaying collective, like the science teacher who drones on about temperature rise and looks dumbly at Casey when she interrupts to ask, "Can we fix it?" Nihilistic groupthink rules our culture, says Bird, and Casey's positivity makes her a pariah.

Apart from that — a big "apart" — I loved the movie. I had to dry my tears and let the buzz wear off before I could argue with it. The creator of The Incredibles, Ratatouille and the last Mission: Impossible film, Ghost Protocol, Bird straddles two worlds, his animation grounded by love of classic cinema, his live-action films liberated by an animator's sense of possibilities.

The cast is fun, too. Though Clooney mugs as much as acts, his comic timing remains superb and his young female co-stars are marvelous. Britt Robertson's jumpy Casey pairs beautifully with Raffey Cassidy's crisp underplaying as the enigmatic Athena. I hope neither actress follows Tomorrowland with a plague or Mad Max film — though we all know that in Hollywood, movies with no future are the future.

A branch of the self-declared Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia that has killed at least 19 people, a move that could represent a significant escalation of the extremist group's operations in the kingdom.

NPR's Leila Fadel reports from Cairo that the online statement from ISIS "named and praised the Saudi suicide bomber who detonated himself amongst a congregation of Shiite Saudis praying in a mosque in the village of al Qudaih in Qatif province."

She says it is the first time a Saudi branch of ISIS known as Najd Province has claimed responsibility for an attack inside the kingdom. Leila says Saudi Shiites are concerned that the attack represents a backlash for Saudi Arabia's military campaign against rebel (Shiite) Houthis in Yemen.

"In the statement, ISIS called Shiite Muslims impure and vowed that dark days are ahead for them. It also said attacks like this one won't stop until they drive all Shiites from the Arab peninsula," Leila reports.

According to The New York Times: "During Saudi Arabia's two-month air campaign against the Houthi movement in Yemen, which practices a form of Shiite Islam and receives backing from Saudi Arabia's regional rival, Iran, imams at Sunni mosques and commentators in Saudi Arabia have frequently rallied the public around the war, in part by repeatedly denouncing Shiites as dangerous infidels."

Al-Jazeera offers a bit of background:

"Saudi Arabia's Shia population is mostly based in two oasis districts of the Eastern Province - Qatif on the Gulf coast, and al-Ahsa, southwest of the provincial capital al-Khobar.

"Qatif and al-Ahsa have historically been the focal point of anti-government demonstrations.

"The kingdom's Shia community accounts for between 10 to 15 percent of the total population. They say they face discrimination in seeking educational opportunities or government employment and that they are referred to disparagingly in text books and by some Sunni officials and state-funded clerics."

Islamic State

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Saudi Arabia

It seems like a no-brainer: Offer kids a reward for showing up at school, and their attendance will shoot up. But a recent study of third-graders in a slum in India suggests that incentive schemes can do more harm than good.

The study, a working paper released by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, looked at 799 boys and girls. The kids, mostly age 9, were students in several dozen single-classroom schools run by the nonprofit Gyan Shala in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Ahmedabad.

I almost felt badly about what we had done. That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all.

- Sujata Visaria, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Gyan Shala's program is free and has a reputation for offering decent quality instruction in language, math and science. Still, attendance rates are no better than the average for the region. On any given day, about a quarter of students are absent. Gyan Shala's administrators believe many opt to stay home and play if, say, it's a festival day or a sibling who attends a different school is off or simply because they're not in the mood for class.

So the researchers challenged kids in about half of the classes: Over a designated 38-day period, show up for at least 32 days — that's 85 percent of the time — and get a special gift: two pencils and an eraser.

That might not sound like much. And it's not as if these kids couldn't get a pencil or eraser some other way, notes Sujata Visaria, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a co-author of the study. Still, such items are a treat in the slums where these kids live, Visaria says.

And the erasers weren't run-of-the-mill. "We spent a lot of time trying to make sure what they got would be a little unusual," she says. "Not a plain, drab erasers but something colorful and shaped like an animal."

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The kids could inspect sample erasers before the 38 days kicked off. The prospect of winning the prize certainly provoked interest. The students were nearly twice as likely to attend class during the 38 days. The effect was particularly pronounced among kids whose attendance level had been the lowest before the reward program began. They were now 2.3 times as likely to come to class. By comparison, kids whose attendance level had been the highest before the reward program also improved their attendance, but by somewhat less: They were 1.8 times as likely to come to class.

So far it all seemed logical, says Visaria. As an economist, she would expect a reward program to be most effective with students who don't already have some existing, intrinsic motivation for going to school — like finding class fun.

After the 38 days, rewards were handed out to those who qualified in a special ceremony in front of the rest of the class. The researchers checked back on the kids two more times. And that's when things got surprising.

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The researchers looked at three different categories:

• Kids whose attendance rate was highest in the class before the reward program. They reverted to their baseline level.

• Kids whose attendance rate was lowest but managed to up their attendance enough to win the prize. After the program was over, these kids also reverted to their lower baseline level.

• Kids whose attendance rate was lowest to start off with and who did not improve enough to qualify for the reward. In other words, they failed the challenge. More than 60 percent of the lowest attenders fell into this category. For them, the aftermath was grim. They were now only about one-fourth as likely to show up for class as they had been before the reward scheme was introduced.

What happened? Visaria speculates that for these low-attending students, the incentive program underscored how poor their attendance was. So they may have lost what little motivation they had to begin with. Other findings in the study bolstered that theory. After the reward program concluded, the kids with lower original attendance rates were less likely to feel confident about their scholastic abilities than before.

Visaria says this result was not just unexpected and cautionary but disheartening. She and her fellow researchers had been prepared for the possibility that the reward program would not prove particularly helpful, or that any positive effects would not last. But they never expected it to leave children worse off.

"I almost felt badly about what we had done," she says. "That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all."

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Education

India

Just a few years ago, downtown Hamilton, Mo. looked a lot like a thousand other forgotten, rural towns. Abandoned, forlorn buildings marred the main drag.

But in recent years, an explosively fast-growing start-up business in rural north western Missouri has shaken up a staid industry, producing a YouTube star and revitalizing a town with a proud retail history.

That's why Dean Hales, who's lived here 77 years, is so delighted now.

"I've lived here most all my life, I can't hardly believe what I'm seeing," he says. "When you've got people coming from all over the world to a little town of 1,800 people, you've got something pretty special. And we do have."

They've got Missouri Star Quilt Company. Just seven years after its launch, fifteen freshly-remodeled buildings in Hamilton now house fabric, sewing machines and customers.

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Missouri Star Quilt Co. co-founder Alan Doan explores a long-vacant space the company is remodeling in downtown Hamilton. This building was formally owned by J.C. Penny, who got his first retail job in the shop downstairs in the 1890s, and made it his 500th J.C. Penny's store in the 1920s. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

Missouri Star Quilt Co. co-founder Alan Doan explores a long-vacant space the company is remodeling in downtown Hamilton. This building was formally owned by J.C. Penny, who got his first retail job in the shop downstairs in the 1890s, and made it his 500th J.C. Penny's store in the 1920s.

Frank Morris/KCUR

Della Badger drove here from Victorville, Calif.

"I just looked on my map and asked Siri, How do I get to Hamilton, Missouri," she says. "But, it was my dream to get here and see Jenny."

Badger's talking about someone she knew only through YouTube, Jenny Doan, of Missouri Star Quilt Company.

Doan's how-to quilting videos have drawn millions of views.

"It's some crazy thing like that," Doan laughs. "I can't hardly use the bathroom in a restaurant without someone saying, 'I love your tutorials!' "

Jenny Doan's DIY quilt tutorials have drawn more than 50 million views.

Doan says it's because she takes an easy-going approach to what traditionally can be a daunting and tedious craft.

"Quilting has always been something that's like, for the elite," she says. "It's kind of a hard thing to do, you know, everything has to be cut perfectly. And I'm like, 'Just whack up, we're going to put it together, this is going to be awesome!' "

She says women from around the world visit Hamilton, or write to thank her for getting them into quilting.

"This has absolutely been the sweetest, most serendipitous thing that has ever happened to me," Doan adds.

And this business would not have happened if she had been a better financial planner.

"My parents have always been bad with money," says Alan Doan, Jenny's son.

He says the recession cost his folks most of their savings, and threatened to take their house.

"Me and my sister were looking at it and said, 'We've got to put something together, so that mom can make a little extra cash,' " Alan says.

So in the fall of 2008, Alan and his sister took out loans and set their mom up with a business sewing other people's quilts together. Customers kept asking for fabric, so Alan built a website to sell it.

"World, we're open! And you expect somebody to care, right? And so we launched the website," Alan says. "I still have my Facebook post, I went and looked at it the other day, it's like, 'Hey I launched this quilt shop for mom, you guys should check it out.' It's [got] like, two likes."

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Doan was selling, or trying to sell, a relatively new product: pre-cut fabric. The pieces come bundled together from the factory in a pack with different, complementary, prints, making it much easier and faster to make good looking quilts.

But one year in, business was terrible.

Jenny says, "Alan came to me and said, 'Mom, are you interested in doing tutorials?' I said, 'Sure honey, what's a tutorial?' I mean, had no idea. I had never been on YouTube.' "

Well, the videos, featuring pre-cut fabrics, eventually took off. Sales exploded and now Missouri Star Quilt employs more than 180 people to sew, staff stores and, like Mindy Loyd, ship thousands of packages a day from the company's huge new warehouse.

"This one's going to Australia," Lloyd says. "Isn't that neat?"

Alan's savviness helped build the foundation of a large business.

"We had to learn how to do this from like watching YouTube videos on how Amazon does it, or something, right? We built this warehouse, and I just called all the smart people I knew and said, 'How do we do this?' " he says.

Success has pushed the company into publishing, even food service. They're renovating more buildings and by mid-summer they plan to double the number of quilt shops in Hamilton, and even add a "man's land" to give their customer's husbands something to do.

The Doans aren't the first people from Hamilton to make it big in retail.

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Alan Doan likes the fact that Missouri Star Quilt Co. is following in the footsteps of fellow Hamilton native J.C. Penny, but Doan's never been into an actual J.C. Penny store. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

Alan Doan likes the fact that Missouri Star Quilt Co. is following in the footsteps of fellow Hamilton native J.C. Penny, but Doan's never been into an actual J.C. Penny store.

Frank Morris/KCUR

James Cash Penny Jr. landed his first sales job here almost 120 years ago. Penny left Hamilton a teenager, but came years later, and opened his 500th J.C. Penny store here.

It's not likely the Missouri Star Quilt Company can match that, but it has so far transformed this once sleepy little town into a quilting mecca.

hamilton, mo.

missouri star quilt company

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