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On casting the emotions in the film

At the very beginning of this process we realized, "Man, we really don't know very much about this subject, so we better do some research." We started looking around online. We found some scientists who said that there are basically three emotions, others went up to 27, others had 16, somewhere in the middle, so we were kind of left with no definitive answer to our basic question, "How many are there?"

Dr. Paul Ekman who worked in San Francisco, still does, which is where Pixar Animation Studios is, he had early in his career identified six, that felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. As I was sort of doodling I was thinking, "Surprise and fear — probably fairly similar." So let's just lose surprise and that left us with five.

On depicting Joy (played by Amy Poehler)

She said, 'Sorry, I just think it's really beautiful that you guys are making a story that tells kids that it's difficult to grow up and it's OK to be sad about it.' We were like, 'Quick! Write that down.'

Pete Docter on Mindy Kaling's reaction to the story

Joy we thought of as kind of an explosion or a spark. She's like an outwardly directed person who is just always moving and she's full of energy. Even the way she looks, if you look at her up close, and this is true of all of the emotions in the film, we wanted them to look not like little people — so they're not made of skin or flesh — they're made out of energy. They have these tiny little particles that sort of roil and move and that we felt was a good way of representing that.

On an emotional moment with Mindy Kaling (who plays Disgust)

She was actually pretty key to decoding some elements of the story. We were really wrestling with these two different themes of growing up and then embracing sadness, which we felt were kind of separate but I had an intuition that they could somehow be connected. I pitched her this story and as I turned around, because I was pitching kind of some visuals on the computer, and she's crying and I thought, "Oh no, did she get like a bad text or something?" She really responded emotionally and she said, "Sorry, I just think it's really beautiful that you guys are making a story that tells kids that it's difficult to grow up and it's OK to be sad about it." We were like, "Quick! Write that down." Because that was really what we were trying to say.

On the importance of Sadness

One of the other experts we consulted was this guy named Dacher Keltner. He was big on sadness as a community bonding, I think is the word he uses. Like if you're sad, it's a way of connecting with other people and a lot of times, we sort of feel embarrassed about being sad and we go off by ourselves to hide and cry by ourselves, but really it's a way of reestablishing relationship.

On the breakthrough he had with the film

We had spent almost three years working on the film and I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio. ... There was this really heavy pressure that whatever we were going to show had to be perfect or at least good enough to move into actual production. And yet, I was sitting there in editorial going, "This is not working."

I was walking around that weekend ... going, "I'm a failure. These other films were flukes. I don't know what I'm doing. I should just quit. What would I miss? I would miss my house and I'd miss going to work." But I think the thing that I realized I would miss most is probably similar to everybody, which is your friends. I thought about it and I realized that the friends that I feel the deepest connection with are the friends that yeah, I've had good times with, but they're also people I've been angry with, that I've had sadness alongside them, I've been scared for them, and it sort of hit me that the very subject matter of the film that I'm dealing with is the key to the most important thing in our lives — and that's our relationships.

We had done all this research showing the job of each individual emotion — fear keeps you safe, it deals with uncertainty; anger is about fairness, if it feels that you're getting ripped off or taken advantage of, that's when anger comes up; sadness deals with loss — and suddenly I had this new revelation, it felt like to me, that those are all true but the real deeper reason we have emotions is to connect us together and that felt big to me.

Movies

'Up' And Away With Pixar's Pete Docter

I suddenly had an idea that we had to get Fear out of there and Sadness connected with Joy, and I ran back, I called producer Jonas Rivera and Ronnie del Carmen who is our co-director, and we met that Sunday night and I went through this whole spiel with them and I was kind of expecting them to sink into their chairs and bury their hands in their faces because the pressure was pretty great. Instead they totally lit up. So the three of us went to ... the other [Pixar] filmmakers and we said, "Well, we were supposed to show you a screening today, but instead I'm going to tell you what we are planning to do." So the cool thing was they very quickly understood why and were totally on board, why this new thing was an improvement and so they got on board and we moved on. It was a scary moment but it was the right call in the long run.

On watching audience reactions

That's one of the real joys for me is going out and watching — and usually I'm not watching the screen, I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to. As [screenwriter] Joe Ranft used to say, "Animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs." ... This film seems like it really brings out a lot of discussion. There's a lot of layers to it.

The drought finally broke for Texas ranchers late last year. The range and pasturelands on which cattle graze began to recover. Then came the spring. In Cameron, about 140 miles northwest of Houston, the rain began falling at the start of May — and didn't stop all month.

"People don't give water enough credit for how much damage it can do," James Burks says. He's general manager of 44 Farms, a cattle ranch bounded by a tributary of the Brazos called the Little River. On Memorial Day, the Little River crested nearly 40 feet above flood stage.

The waters demolished fences and ruined crops planted as feed for the cattle. Still, Burks and his men had been watching the river closely. They were able to get their herd to higher ground before the worst of the flood hit.

Other ranchers weren't as lucky. At the Liberty Bell Ranch, roughly 50 miles northeast of Houston, about 500 head of cattle were trapped by the rising waters of the Trinity River.

"It was decided by the cattle owner that we would just try to drive 'em out," Liberty County Sheriff Bobby Rader says.

"Water was over the levee. It was washing out the levee. It was really, really swift waters. The water was deep in many places, up to 20 foot deep that the cows had to swim through on one of the routes that we took."

Most of the animals did reach safety, but several lost their footing and drowned.

Flooding can have another nasty side effect for cattle. Standing water is a perfect breeding ground for insects.

"The flies become a real issue, and then with flies comes transmission of disease, primarily pinkeye," says Bob McClaren, owner of 44 Farms. "And if one [cow or bull] gets pinkeye, flies get in their eyes and then they land on another one. So it's easily transmitted."

McClaren has to keep a close watch on his cows and bulls: untreated, pinkeye can destroy an animal's sight.

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Farmers in Texas have gone from having to deal with too little water to too much. Katlin Mazzocco/44 Farms hide caption

itoggle caption Katlin Mazzocco/44 Farms

Farmers in Texas have gone from having to deal with too little water to too much.

Katlin Mazzocco/44 Farms

Flooding has taken a toll on other parts of Texas agriculture, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Cotton farmers have seen their crops ruined. The rain has been so heavy this spring that many weren't able to plant at all. But for many ranchers, the wet weather ultimately works in their favor.

"I expect as soon as the waters drain off, we're going to have the greatest grass and forage and hay yield of all time," says John Robinson, an economist with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

Around the Nation

Drought Puts Texas Ranchers, And Cattle, At Risk

The Salt

No 'Misteak': High Beef Prices A Boon For Drought-Weary Ranchers

Ordinarily, Texas is home to about 15 percent of the entire U.S. supply of beef cattle. The drought forced the state's ranchers to sell off roughly a million animals they couldn't afford to feed. That sent beef prices soaring at grocery stores all over the country in recent years. If the deluge helps pastures recover this summer, ranchers will have an easier time rebuilding their herds. Eventually, that will bring beef prices back down.

"We can manage through the mud and the rain," McClaren says. "It's when you don't have any moisture at all that it gets to be real dire and a bigger concern. So, we're blessed to have the moisture, and we're not complaining about that."

That's not to say McClaren isn't concerned. The last time he saw severe flooding was in 2007. The drought began not long after the waters went down. The Cameron rancher is hoping history isn't about to repeat itself.

cattle

agriculture

flooding

Texas

Imagine publishing a list of all of your recent sexual partners in the local paper. That was what one 2001 Florida law, enacted under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, required of some women in the state.

Huffington Post reporter Laura Bassett brought the so-called "Scarlet Letter law" to national attention in a Tuesday piece. Here's a rundown of what exactly that law did, and why it was passed in the first place.

What did the law do?

The law in question was a 2001 overhaul of the state's adoption regulations. Bush wrote shortly after the legislature passed the bill that the law was intended to bring more "certainty" into adoptions. The goal was to "provide greater finality once the adoption is approved, and to avoid circumstances where future challenges to the adoption disrupt the life of the child."

One way to accomplish that was to balance "the rights and responsibilities" of the both birth parents, as well as the adoptive parents, Bush wrote. To the end of preserving the rights of a birth father, the law required a woman, who didn't know who had fathered her child, to put a notice in the newspaper so that a potential father could see it and respond before that child was put up for adoption.

The published notice would have to contain an extensive list of personal information, including potential cities and dates where the act of conception may have occurred, according to a 2004 Notre Dame Law Review article:

"The notice ... must contain a physical description, including, but not limited to age, race, hair and eye color, and approximate height and weight of the minor's mother and of any person the mother reasonably believes may be the father; the minor's date of birth; and any date and city, including the county and state in which the city is located, in which conception may have occurred."

And it wasn't a one-time ad — it had to run once a week for a month, at the expense of either the mother or the people who wanted to adopt the baby, as that 2004 article explains.

Because the law required women to put their sexual history on display, it became known as the "Scarlet Letter law," after the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel in which the protagonist must wear a red A on her dress to signify that she had committed adultery.

Did Jeb Bush want women to be shamed for their sexual activity?

It's true that, years before the law was passed (and before Bush was even governor), Bush had bemoaned what he saw as a lack of social stigma for having children outside of marriage. In his 1995 book Profiles in Character, Bush wrote (in a chapter with the dark title, "The Restoration of Shame"), as Bassett reports:

"One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame."

In that book, Bassett also writes, Bush invokes "The Scarlet Letter" (approvingly) as an example of how society had once condemned people for sexual impropriety.

Those may have been his general thoughts, but it's also true that he didn't wholeheartedly approve of the adoption law. He thought it put too much of the onus on the birth mother to find the father, as he wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Katherine Harris, upon letting the bill pass into law without signing it.

"House Bill 141 does have its deficiencies," he wrote. "Foremost, in its effort to strike the appropriate balance between rights and responsibilities, there is a shortage of responsibility on behalf of the birth father that could be corrected by requiring some proactive conduct on his part."

In fact, immediately after he let the bill become law, Bush was advocating for fixes to it. The Florida House almost immediately passed a law that Bush considered a "better alternative." It cut back on women's reporting requirements and established a paternity registry, for example. These are state-maintained databases that allowed a man to register if he believed he may have fathered a child. Then, if that child were ever put up for adoption, the father would have been notified and he could have a say in the proceedings.

Is the law still in effect?

Nope. Two years after the law passed, Bush signed a replacement law that addressed many of his 2001 concerns, including instituting a paternity registry. This happened just weeks after a Florida appellate panel declared the provision requiring women to list their sexual encounters an unconstitutional, because it was deemed an invasion of privacy, as the L.A. Times reported at the time.

So what does this do to his presidential candidacy?

This early in the game, it's easy to overestimate how consequential pretty much anything is that happens. After all, Bush is expected to only formally announce his candidacy Monday.

However, it's true that this comes during a rough week for the fledgling campaign. In a surprise move this week, Bush reconfigured his campaign staff. And his superPAC, Right to Rise, looks unlikely to raise the $100 million in the first half of 2015 it had expected, as the Washington Post's Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger report.

Looking at the bigger picture, it's possible the issue could come back in a general election, if he gets through the primary. Democrats are pushing it, because it plays into a common narrative of the Republican Party as both parties try to appeal to women.

2016 Presidential Race

Jeb Bush

women

Republicans

The Environmental Protection Agency today started what could be a lengthy process: making rules to limit the amount of climate-warming pollution that comes from aircraft engines.

In a statement, the EPA said it's "proposing to find" that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from commercial aircraft contribute to "pollution that causes climate change endangering the health and welfare of Americans." The agency hasn't outlined any limits yet; this statement is just an announcement that it's begun the process that would lead to limits down the road.

The EPA pointed out that any rules would not apply to military aircraft or the types of planes used for recreational purposes. Once the EPA's "action" is published in the Federal Register, it will be open for a 60-day public comment period.

The EPA also said it is releasing details of the work by the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organization to develop international carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions guidelines for aircraft. Those are expected to be adopted in early 2016. The EPA and the Federal Aviation Administration have been involved in that process on behalf of the U.S., and the EPA says it's working to make sure any standards reached "are equitable across national boundaries."

NPR's Christopher Joyce told our Newscast Unit that EPA rules on airplane emissions will likely parallel any rules coming out of the U.N. Joyce also said the aviation industry has previously fought regulations proposed by international authorities.

But in a statement released in response to today's EPA news, Airlines For America, the industry's trade group, didn't explicitly oppose any of the work of the EPA or the UN. Rather, it argued that U.S. aviation already has an "exceptional environmental track record." A4A says the industry has improved fuel efficiency over 120% since 1978, and saved "over 3.8 billion metric tons of CO2, the equivalent to taking 23 million cars off the road each of those years." Nancy Young, vice president of A4A said, "U.S. airlines are green and we are getting even greener."

The EPA says U.S. aircraft emit about 11% of the U.S. transportation sector's greenhouse gas emissions, and 29% of those emissions from all aircraft across the globe.

The New York Times says this push for action on aircraft emissions is "the latest of Mr. Obama's major initiatives to combat global warming." The Times says next week, the Obama administration will propose rules on emissions for heavy-duty trucks, and in August, it will announce new rules on power plant pollution.

Environmental Protection Agency

greenhouse gases

climate change