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A colleague accosted me at the coffee machine the other day with an urgent question. "Why are pine nuts so expensive?"

I promised to find out. And I did. But along the way, I discovered something remarkable about pine nuts.

They connect us to a world of remote villages and vast forests, ancient foraging traditions that are facing modern threats.

Pine nuts don't generally come from orchards, or fields, or plantations. They come from pine forests. (And pine nuts are expensive because most of these areas are so remote.)

The nuts are hidden inside the cones of certain species of pine, such as the mighty Siberian pine, which covers thousands of square miles of Siberia. A few pine nut plantations have been set up in Spain and Portugal, but they produce only a tiny portion of the world's pine nuts.

Leo Sharashkin, a Russian forester who now lives in Missouri, still remembers feeling overwhelmed the first time he saw this pine nut harvest. "We tend to think of food as coming from farms," he says. "We till the soil and get nourishment from the soil. But there, I was seeing all these trees that were laden with cones that took no human effort to produce!"

In the midst of this forest, Sharashkin says, you can't usually see the cones. The trees are thick, and the nuts are far up in the forest canopy. "But whenever I saw a tree standing in the open, it looked like a huge Christmas tree, with the cones hanging in the branches," he says.

Once a year, the pine trees drop these cones onto the forest floor, and entire Siberian villages move into the forest for a month or so to gather them. "It doesn't take any special equipment," Sharashkin says. "You go into the forest, you pick up the cones from the ground, put them into burlap bags, and then transport them to wherever they are being crushed to extract the nuts."

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Russia exports some nuts officially and others unofficially; truckloads of them are smuggled across the border into China.

China has its own pine forests. And it is the world's biggest exporter of pine nuts. Pine nuts also come from North Korea, Pakistan and Afghanistan. (Look at that list and you realize that good food can come from troubled places.)

There are a few American pine nuts, too. They're a regional specialty in the West, and people are harvesting them right now.

I reached Dayer LeBaron on his cellphone as he pursued pine nuts on a mountain range called Butte Mountain, near Ely, Nev.

A few hundred feet above LeBaron, pion (also known as pinyon) pines cover the mountainside. They are modest but hardy trees that you'll find across mountains and foothills of the West, from Nevada to New Mexico. The nuts of this tree have nourished people living here for thousands of years.

These mountains are public land, and in Nevada, anyone is free to harvest up to 25 pounds of pion pine nuts for personal use. LeBaron, though, purchased the rights to gather the nuts commercially from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. It's his family business: wholesalepinenuts.com.

One type of pion pine grows in Nevada; a different kind, in New Mexico. But in both areas, pine nuts are deeply rooted in local culture, and in food prepared on special occasions.

"Especially Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's," says LeBaron. "If you don't have them, it's like taking turkey out of Thanksgiving. Or taking Santa Claus out of Christmas — it's almost that important!"

But this year's harvest has been poor, LeBaron says. Insects have been eating the nuts, and strange weather disrupted the normal harvest pattern. LeBaron blames climate change.

Penny Frazier, an environmentalist who lives in the Ozarks, in Missouri, says government land managers aren't doing enough to protect this forest.

"It's an incredibly productive ecosystem that has been misunderstood and not managed for its forestry values," she says. "We've lost close to half of that habitat, that ecosystem, in the course of 20 years."

Some of the forest was cleared to expand range land for cattle grazing.

Frazier, who calls herself Pinyon Penny, has set up her own business — pinenut.com — to sell American pine nuts. Sharashkin, the Russian forester, also works for pinenut.com. By promoting pine nuts, they're also encouraging people to appreciate, and protect, the forests that produce them.

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пятница

In her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs delves into the personal histories of light-skinned African-Americans who, because of their fair complexions and social circumstance, were able to "pass" as white. Code Switch's Karen Grigsby Bates spoke with Hobbs who explained that, in the past, passing was really a group effort that involved the complicity of a person's family and community. We wondered what passing means now, not just for African-Americans, but for others who want to live beyond the social boundaries of group identity.

Passing today, many folks explained, was less about accurately identifying themselves as one race versus another, but rather giving other people one identity to wrap their minds around.

[View the story "Twitter Recap: What Does Racial "Passing" Look Like Today?" on Storify]

Three different themes came up in our discussion:

People choosing to pass, depending on the situation.

People who identified as multiracial sometimes presenting one aspect of their multi-ethnic heritage, while being encouraged to hide others.

Strangers assuming that a person has a racial identity that they don't have.

@NPRCodeSwitch @karenbates Yes, one passed to play professional baseball during segregation.

— Sonya Alexander (@wordslinger1) October 8, 2014

@NPRCodeSwitch in Italy my Iranian family passed as Italian. In Spain nobody thought we were Spaniards. In Germany we were seen as Turkish,

— sabuki (@srsos) October 8, 2014

@NPRCodeSwitch which is why we left. In the states, it was easier to situationally pass for white when I was younger.

— sabuki (@srsos) October 8, 2014

@NPRCodeSwitch @karenbates Me and my siblings were raised to pass and not disclose having a biracial Dad or a Jewish mother.

— Lillian Cohen-Moore (@lilyorit) October 8, 2014

@NPRCodeSwitch @karenbates i was at the gym and a woman started talking to me in Spanish. I answered in English and she was offended. +

— Anna Lynn Martino (@annalynnmartino) October 8, 2014

@NPRCodeSwitch @karenbates + then she asked "Aren't you Mexican?" I said "No, I'm Filipina."

— Anna Lynn Martino (@annalynnmartino) October 8, 2014

@CharlesPulliam @NPRCodeSwitch Interestingly, it was my dad (Korean) who wanted to erase Korean identity from his kids.

— /mieszanej krwi (@pointfivekorean) October 8, 2014

@NPRCodeSwitch @karenbates @katchow @RadioMirage Passing requires others' perceptions, I think who I am with also reveals my identity.

— Stephanie M Rushford (@SMRushford) October 8, 2014

No, no, I promise: This is not about Derek Jeter. May bats fly down my chimney and trolls enter my door if I inflict any more Derek Jeter farewell upon you. But, of course, I am a sentimental creature, and the player whose name dare not be spoken again did gush forth memories of other grand finales.

I think the most dramatic leavetakings were those accomplished by athletes who made their ultimate bow a championship. Norm Van Brocklin, the Dutchman, led the Eagles over Vince Lombardi's Packers in the NFL title game of 1960, then hung it up. Poor, gruff Van Brocklin would die young but, oh, my, what an exit for an athlete.

And then there was Bill Russell, who left the court forever in 1969 after winning his 11th championship in the seventh game of the NBA finals, beating Wilt Chamberlain and the Lakers in Los Angeles.

Two basketball coaches, Johnny Wooden of UCLA and Al McGuire of Marquette, not only won the NCAAs in their swansong, but had previously declared this would be their goodbye. I telegraphed Al afterward with just the name of a country-western song he liked: "The girls get prettier at closin' time."

Because an individual sport is the most intimate, perhaps the dearest going-away victory was by Pete Sampras in the 2002 U.S. Open final. Supposed to be a has-been, a second-round loser at Wimbledon, seeded 17th, Pete beat Andre Agassi, then never played again.

And the saddest: Probably a guy you never heard of, Wayne Estes, an All-American basketball player at Utah State. On Feb. 8, 1965, he won his last college game, scoring 48 points. Afterward, Estes stopped at the scene of an accident, and because he was so tall, his head brushed against a downed live wire, and he was electrocuted only hours after his beautiful valedictory.

Ah, but the sweetest goodbye is part of the tradition of wrestling. When Rulon Gardner, who'd won the gold at the 2000 Olympics, only won the bronze in '04, he just sat down, took off his shoes and left them there in the middle of the mat. Hail and farewell.

I was covering Secretariat's last race at Woodbine in Toronto in 1973. After he won, I went down to the finish line and snatched up the very grass where, best I could tell, the supreme champion's hooves had last touched a race track. I stuffed it in my pocket and took it home. Told you I was a sentimental fool.

Derek Jeter

Andre Agassi

sports

Frank DeFord

Every now and then you can see a short story come to life right in front of you.

We were on a train this week while a man in a seat nearby spoke in a voice loud enough to carry above the whoosh of the rails to a man whose name we have changed to Phil, to tell him that the company had deliberated and decided they had to make "a transition" in his department.

Phil was being fired.

And, the man on the phone asked Phil to stay on to help hire and train his successor.

"Now Phil, I don't want you to feel bad about this tonight," he told him. "Go home, talk it over with your girlfriend, have a good night ... " He even added, "I hope we'll always be friends."

I wonder how Phil feels about that ...

The man's tone was considerate. His words may have sounded a little scripted, but he was essentially polite.

It was the setting that made you squirm: firing a man not to his face, but in a mobile phone call; made from a crowded train car; between stops.

At first I felt I shouldn't listen — for Phil's sake. But it was irresistible to hear one side of the dialogue and not try to imagine the drama on the other end: a quick call made by a man from aboard a moving train, and the course of a man's life on the other end is altered utterly.

Traditional etiquette changes with the times, and technology. A short text message declaring love can be as welcome as a poet's sonnet, if they're the right words from the person from whom you want to hear them. There's comfort in the immediacy of receiving a condolence email, Facebook message or a Tweet within just a few hours of the death of a loved one.

But firing a man on a mobile phone in a public setting? I doubt that's in any manual of etiquette or management techniques.

YouTube

"It's a city of strangers. Some come to work, some to play."

I don't know anything more than what we heard. But what my imagination has filled in, the way a short story does, is that the man making the phone call may have been tired of firing people over the last few years. He knew the lines to utter, and the pauses to add; but he didn't look forward to crushing one more person, making them worry about how to pay their rent, get through winter, keep their pride and provide for their family. So maybe the man delayed his grim mission all day until he just couldn't any longer, and had to call at the last moment from a moving train.

We heard just one side of a phone call, and saw just one side of a stranger on a train.

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