Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor readily concedes that she was the beneficiary of affirmative action in higher education, and she doesn't really know why her view is so different from that of her colleague, Justice Clarence Thomas.
Interactive: Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Family Photos
Chef and culinary historian Maricel Presilla owns two restaurants and has written many cookbooks. But her newest book, Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, is her attempt to give fans a heaping helping of the many cultures she blends into her world.
"It's my whole life," she tells Morning Edition host David Greene. "There are recipes there of my childhood, things that I remember my family, my aunts doing. But also things that I learned as I started to travel Latin America."
Greene recently invited Presilla into his kitchen to whip up a batch of yuca fries with cilantro sauce, a dish served in many Cuban restaurants. The fries are authentic, but the now-common sauce isn't, Presilla says. "It's my recipe," she told Greene, created while she was a consultant for Victor's Cafe in the 1980s in New York and Miami.
Inspired by an Indian cilantro chutney, she created an aioli with garlic and cilantro to accompany yuca fries on the restaurant menu. "Everybody who tries that thinks it is a traditional Cuban recipe when, in reality, Cubans don't like cilantro that much," she says.
You don't often get yuca fries without the green stuff on the side these days — at least not in the U.S.
As the pair prepared Presilla's famous sauce, Greene asked her about the value of sitting while cooking, something she calls the "Zen of the Latin kitchen."
Most Virginians say they approve of the job that first-term GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell is doing, suggesting he'd have a good shot at re-election when his term expires at the end of this year.
But it's one-and-out for governors in Virginia, the only state that doesn't allow its chief executive to serve consecutive terms.
That's left the state with a governor's race that has many voters shaking their heads and asking, "How did we end up with these two?"
"These two" are Democrat Terry McAuliffe, 55, a Clinton-era fundraiser extraordinaire and former Democratic National Committee chairman who got walloped in a party primary for governor in 2009; and Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 44, the state attorney general whose conservatism far outflanks most on the right of the political spectrum.
"We've got Bill Clinton's big-money man versus a social issues extremist," says the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato. The frank assessment may offend true believers, but resonates with a wide swath of Virginia voters.
There may be a third candidate. McDonnell's pick as his successor, Republican Lt. Gov. Bob Bolling, 55, suspended his campaign after the party decided to choose its candidate at a convention instead of holding a primary. The move favored Cuccinelli.
But Bolling has kept everyone guessing about whether he'll run as an independent.
This all in a state that President Obama has won twice, where changing demographics have created a true swing state, but where voters in recent history have picked a governor of the opposite party of the president.
"There's a history that the party that loses the White House wins the governor's race," says Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "And the electorate this year will be older and whiter than it was last year."
"That's why Cuccinelli has a shot," Brown says.
Disenchanted Voters
The results of two polls released this week reflected Virginia voters' current ennui, if not enmity.
Both early surveys found a close race — and something else: Voters don't much like Cuccinelli, and they don't know McAuliffe.
A Quinnipiac University poll had the two candidates essentially tied; a Public Policy Polling survey had McAuliffe up by 5 percentage points, but with 13 percent undecided.
Here's Cuccinelli's problem: Forty-five percent of those surveyed by PPP, a Democratic firm, said they had an unfavorable opinion of Cuccinelli.
As for McAuliffe, just over a quarter of those surveyed told PPP that they had an unfavorable opinion of him, but half said they weren't even sure what they thought of the guy, though this is his second run for governor.
The Quinnipiac poll found that 61 percent of those surveyed hadn't heard enough about McAuliffe to form an opinion.
McAuliffe Remains Mystery
"Nobody knows who he is," says Brown, the Quinnipiac pollster. "Activists might know McAuliffe, but Joe and Jill Sixpack don't."
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Lantagne says comparison of the Haitian cholera strain with one circulating in Nepal, around the same time, shows the two differed in only one out 4 million genetic elements.
"That's considered an exact match – that they're the same strain of cholera," she tells Shots.
Most scientists now think Nepalese soldiers unwittingly brought cholera to Haiti when they joined a U.N. peacekeeping force there in 2010. The outbreak started just downstream from their camp. Sewage from the camp spilled into a nearby river.
Lantagne was one of four scientists appointed by the U.N. to look into the matter. Their report, issued in May 2011, implicated the U.N. camp as a likely origin, but it concluded that the outbreak was caused by "a confluence of circumstances."
She tells Shots that the report would come out different today.
"If we had had the additional scientific evidence that's available now, we definitely would have written the report in 2011 differently, to state the most likely source of introduction was someone associated with the peacekeeping camp," Lantagne says.
That's important because the U.N. insists that whatever way cholera got to Haiti, terrible sanitary conditions and lack of clean water were responsible for its remarkably fast spread.
But lawyer Brian Concannon doesn't buy that.
"It's like lighting a fire in a dry field on a windy day, and then blaming the wind or the drought for the fire," says Concannon, who directs a Boston-based group called the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
More than a year ago, the group filed a legal claim against the U.N. demanding that it accept responsibility.
“ Haiti has done some great things with vaccination. They've eliminated measles, rubella and polio, and you can't say that in many countries in Europe.