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When Morning Edition began in 1979 the sonorous voice of Carl Kasell was there to read the headlines. The 75-year-old newscaster has worked in radio for over 50 years and delivered his final Morning Edition broadcast today. He ...

Next year the city will have 13 new City Council members. Brian Lehrer and WNYC are exploring who they are, where they come from, and what they hope to accomplish.

Today we meet City Councilwoman-Elect Margaret Chin (D-1), who will represent Chinatown, SoHo, TriBeCa, and parts of the ...

The Food Bank for NYC is pushing hunger awareness with a "Go Orange Campaign"

Across the city, emergency food providers say they're seeing more first time visitors at ...

Michael Bloomberg claims that the upcoming election is a referendum on his record. So, what does the record tell us? Joyce Purnick has just published the sweeping biography Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics, which tells ...

Rabbi Dan Ain and Holly Gewandter of the New Shul in Greenwich Village discuss The House of Awe & Repentance Café an art exhibit and prayer space established for the High Holy Days.

Listen ...

One of the hottest points in the health care debate is whether and how to save money at the end of life. Dr. Hannah Wunsch, department of Anesthesiology at Columbia, discusses her new report in ...

Dr. Lloyd Sederer, medical director at the New York State Office of Mental Health discusses mental health and addiction issues on college campuses and what to be aware of as a parent and a student.

Veteran foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, T.R. Reid traveled the world to compare the health care systems of rich democracies to the United States. He ...

New York City is the former oyster capitol of the world. There was a time when New York Harbor had over 350 square miles of oyster beds, half of the world supply. Street-side oyster vendors were as popular as hot dog carts are today. Local oysters were a delicious treat, they cleaned the waterways and they bolstered aquatic wildlife. But oysters have since disappeared from New York Harbor, mostly because of human intervention. Now, there are new efforts to reintroduce them in Jamaica Bay.

Mark Kurlansky, the author of The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, and Jeffrey Levinton, distinguished professor of ecology and evolution at SUNY Stony Brook, visit The Brian Lehrer Show to talk about the history of oysters in New York Harbor, and plans to reintroduce them.

Listen to the whole show:

Andrea Bernstein: Let's start with a history. I'm very intrigued by this idea of oysters being sold like hot dogs.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, oysters are an animal that lives in brackish water, which is water that's saltier than fresh water but not as salty as the sea. Estuaries of rivers, places where fresh water dumps into sea water are the ideal climate. New Yorkers too easily forget that the five boroughs of New York City are at the magnificent estuary of the Hudson River and the estuary used to be full of oysters.

That means the East River and the Hudson and out in the harbor around Staten Island and Liberty Island and Ellis Island, which used to be called Big and Little Oyster Island. The coast of the Bronx, back when the Bronx had a non-industrial coast, and the Brooklyn coast into Queens and Jamaica...it was all full of oysters. There was this tremendous natural resource that was identified with New York so that, for centuries, if somebody said they were going to New York City, the typical response was 'Enjoy the oysters!' They were sold everywhere.

Bernstein: Until when?

Kurlansky: Until 1927 when the last bed was closed. A process began in the 1880's when they started understanding about germs. There were chronic epidemics in New York history and they never really understood the cause of them. Everybody sort of assumed that it must be caused by foreigners and immigration and poverty. Then they started understanding what really caused things like cholera and developed the ability to trace them. They kept tracing them to oyster beds. One by one, with each disease outbreak, a bed was closed. The last bed, which was in Raritan Bay between Staten Island and New Jersey, was closed in 1927. Then it was over.

Seven years ago, the United Nations conducted a study of human development in the Arab world. Now it has released a follow up and there’s not a lot of good news for the 330 million ...

Should you wait an hour after eating before you jump in the pool? Do you lose most of your body heat through your head? Dr. Aaron Carroll is the co-author of Don't Swallow Your Gum! Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies ...

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy visited The Brian Lehrer Show today to talk about her new book The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. She spoke with guest host Mike Pesca.

Listen to the whole interview:

Here's an excerpt from their conversation:

Mike Pesca: What’s interesting or significant about “uh oh”?

Alison Gopnik: It turns out that “uh oh” is one of the very first things that young children say which is sort of surprising. When you actually look carefully at how they use it, which is what I did when I was in graduate school, it turns out that they’re actually using 'uh oh' to talk about the fact that they’re trying to do something, that they have vision of the world and it's not working out. That’s a very abstract thing for very young babies to be talking about.

Pesca: Maybe it’s overstating it, but your premise is that babies are not only smarter than we thought they were, they may in some ways be smarter than we are. What do you think of that?

Gopnik: Babies and young children are really designed for learning. One of the puzzles about human beings is, why do we have this long period of childhood at all? Why are we immature for so long and dependent on our parents for so long?

One of the ideas that has come out of both evolution and psychology is that we have that protected period so that we can learn all the things that we need to learn before we actually have to put them into action. From that perspective, it makes sense that babies and young children would be the best learning machines in the universe. Then when you actually look at what they can do, especially work we’ve done in the last 10 years, it turns out that they can recognize statistics they can use probabilistic logic, they can do things that the best machine learning programs and scientists can do.

Pesca: Obvious question is, how do you know they can learn statistics? Maybe it's best to talk about the ping pong ball experiment you set up.

Gopnik: This was actually an experiment that my colleague Fei Xu set up. What she did was show babies a box full of mixed up ping pong balls, 80% of them white 20% of them red. Then she showed babies an experiment, either taking all white balls out of the box or all red balls out of the box.

If you’ve got a mixed-up box, both of those sequences are possible, but it's much more probable statistically that you’ll pick out all white balls for an 80% white box and all red balls. In fact, the babies were very surprised. They looked much longer when they saw the experimenter picking out the red balls from the mostly white box. That means that they must have been sensitive to this pretty abstract statistical fact about the sample that you can take from a population.

Captain Abu Raed

'Captain Abu Raed,' the first film from Jordanian-American film maker Amin Matalqa, opens this week. The captain in question would like to have traveled around the world. But he's actually an airport janitor. Kids in his ...

Ask anyone the best way drop a few pounds and chances are you'll hear that if you exercise, you'll lose weight. But many adults who exercise at the gym or run or bike say their weight has remained the same year after year. A Time Magazine article says the basic problem is that while exercise burns calories, it can stimulate hunger. WNYC's Amy Eddings interviewed John Cloud who wrote the article.

Amy Eddings: First of all, you have got to be kidding me! No! For years we've been hearing that key to weight control was diet and exercise, diet and exercise, like peanut butter and jelly, together forever, one linked to the other -- and you're telling me now, no?

John Cloud: Right and let me just begin by saying exercise is not completely useless, in fact you want to exercise for all kinds of reasons for your heart health, for your mental health for your joints.

Eddings: But we want to get thin, John, we want to get taut.

Cloud: In terms of weight loss and exercise, there are a couple things going on. One study I quote at length in this story was a study with a group of women in Louisiana and Texas, 464 women who were recruited to exercise three to four times a week with a personal trainer. Their exercise was very carefully calibrated, their heart rates were measured. This was a serious exercise group. They were followed for six months. Their diets didn't change. In fact, they were told, 'Maintain your standard diet and everything'. They compared this group to a group of women who didn't exercise. All they did was fill out monthly forms detailing any medical symptoms they had.

At the end of the six months, they found that the women who exercised had lost no more weight than the women who all they did once a month was think about their health and their diets. They filled out these forms, which had the effect probably of causing them to eat a little bit less, so that they lost a little bit of weight, too.

The person who runs the study calls this phenomenon 'compensation.' Whether because you are hungrier or you reward yourself when you get home, you tend to eat more when you exercise a lot.

Eddings: If you rule out compensation. if people get honest with themselves and stop overeating after a hard work out, then does exercise help?

'In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,' Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher.

Cloud: Sure, but we're not really built very well to do that. You know a lot of people have this up and down roller coaster thing with their weight. They'll either go on a diet or they'll adopt some exercise regimen. In the year 2000, these psychologists published a pretty well-known paper in psychology circles about self control. They observed in this paper that self control is like a muscle. If you go out and go running for an hour, it's going to be much harder to get back home and make decisions about anything really, but particularly about food. You've already done this great thing for yourself. That's just kind of how we're built psychologically.

What to read? WNYC\'s Brian Lehrer searches for a good book before his vacation.

Brian Lehrer is getting ready to leave for a two-week vacation and he's asking for your help. What should he read or listen to? What current fiction are you reading and what new music are you listening to? Let's turn to the 'Brian Lehrer Community' for book and music picks!

See staff picks here

Listen to the callers' picks here:

And here is a sampling of what some of Brian's commentors had to say as well as some suggestions from Brian's Facebook page:

John from Brooklyn August 06, 2009 - 10:38AM
I highly recommend Jessica Anthony's novel 'The Convalescent.' If you want a Geek Love meets Hungarian tribal history type of story, this is for you. I actually wish I hadn't finished just so I can keep reading.
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Ashley Semrick DesRochers, Facebook
The album 'Disfarmer' by Bill Frisell. Tracks composed with inspiration from the depression era photographer Disfarmer... the result is stunning!

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Rachelle August 06, 2009 - 11:33AM
Bill Callahan's new album, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, is AMAZING. Mellow but lovely. Perfect for a relaxing drive along the coast.
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Emily Miller, Facebook
The Hour I First Believed--Wally Lamb--It is somewhat depressing, but you can get wrapped up in it. . .It's a nice long one for a two week vacation.
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Helen from East Harlem August 06, 2009 - 11:36AM
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kristin Downey.
Very readable and engaging nonfiction book about the first woman Cabinet member.
Frances Perkins was FDR' Sect. of Labor who helped us get Social Security, the minimum wage, safe work places, the end of child labor, CCC, WPA, and so on!
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Caitlin from Jersey City August 06, 2009 - 11:39AM
Aughh two whole Brianless weeks?!
Regina Spektor's new album is really great. Book: Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery - dystopian near-future hippy-novel-esque sci-fi.
Editor's Note: You can listen to an interview with Regina Spektor and hear her perform live on Soundcheck here

This weekend is the 3rd Annual Yo-Yo Open. The organizer of the event is yo-yo champion and former banker Pat Cuartero who stopped by the WNYC studios today to speak with host Brian Lehrer and ...

Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum, co-editors of The Fat Studies Reader, tell Brian Lehrer we need to stop obsessing about weight -- and start accepting fat people.

Brian Lehrer: First off, Esther, we are supposed to use the word fat right this has been reclaimed by the movement.

Esther Rothblum: That’s right. The word fat focuses exactly on what we’re looking at and that’s body fat. For example, if we just talk about weight, somebody who is tall and thin may actually weigh more than someone who is short and fat. If you think about elite athletes like Serena Williams the tennis star, she has a lot more muscle, let’s say than someone who doesn’t play tennis so she would weigh more.

But fat studies scholars use that term just the way other oppressed groups have reclaimed words like people of African decent reclaimed the word black and some young gay men and lesbians are reclaiming the word queer. So what words like fat and black and queer have in common is people are saying let's take a word that really says who we are, perhaps even a word that’s been used negatively and let’s reclaim it.

Lehrer: We have a history, Sonrda Solovay, of increasing obesity in the United State to the point where now the National Institutes of Health defines over 60% of Americans as overweight or obese. That’s a lot more than it used to be. So if we’re going to look at fatness as in the category of civil rights and say that it’s like being black or it's like being queer, can we really go there, because since this is something that behavior is causing?

Sondra Solovay: First of all, I don’t agree with your assumption that this is something that behavior is causing.

Lehrer: At least for a large percentage of obese people, is that not accurate?

Solovay: No, I think it's way more complicated then that simple sentence. I know that the discourse that people have about weight makes it seem just that simple. Calories in, calories out, don’t sit on the couch, don’t eat donuts, you’ll be thin. But, in fact, there have always been fat people and there always will be fat people. And what we do is, we change the definitions of who is fat, literally overnight. The definition of who was fat was changed several years ago, around the time when my first book was coming out, so that people who went to bed not fat, woke up fat just because we changed how we defined that.

Filmmakers MA Shumin and ManSee Kong join Brian Lehrer to discuss gentrification on The Lower East Side and in Chinatown. Both women have movies playing in The Asian American International Film Festival this weekend. MA ...

Culture jamming activists Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum are the members of the Yes Men. They infiltrate big business and impersonate political leaders. They are also behind the new film that documents their hi jinks, ...

Ray Chambers, the UN Secretary General's special envoy for malaria, discusses his efforts to fight malaria around the world with Brian Lehrer. Chambers suggests that the UN's work against malaria and other humanitarian work in ...