Amy Pearl

Jeff Johnson, BET correspondent and the author of Everything Im Not Made Me Everything I Am: Discovering Your Personal Best, discusses his new book and his documentary about Kurdistan.

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Beth Fertig, WNYC reporter and author of Why Can't You Teach Me 2 Read?, explores urban schools through the story of three NYC students who made it to high school without being able to read.

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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offer a call-to-arms to challenge the oppression of women worldwide in their new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf, 2009).

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A comprehensive new report reveals widespread abuse of low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project and co-author of the new report, Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers, discusses the findings. Plus, Amy Carroll, supervising ...

James Barron, New York Times Metro Section reporter, discusses his compilation of stories, The New York Times' Book of New York: 549 Stories of the People, the Streets, and the Life of the City Past and Present.

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Director Rebecca Cammisa discusses her feature-length documentary "Which Way Home," which follows three unaccompanied children as they leave their homes in Latin America and travel through Mexico to the U.S. border in order to reunite ...

Judith Matloff explains why, after 20 years as a foreign correspondent, she decided to put down roots in New York by buying a dilapidated brownstone on a rough block in West Harlem. She tells the ...

The temperature was 103 degrees Friday afternoon on the Number 1 train platform at 72nd Street

Make no mistake, it's hot and sticky out there.

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.

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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.

David Pogue, the personal technology writer for The New York Times, visited The Brian Lehrer Show to talk about his new book The World According to Twitter.

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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 ...

In his documentary "Black Magic", filmmaker Dan Klores looks at how African-American players and coaches changed the game of basketball. The film won a Peabody and has just been released on DVD.

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According to Studio 360's Kurt Andersen, the economic crisis might have an upside. His latest book is called Reset.

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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 ...

Spike Lee's 'Do The Right Thing' came out 20 years ago. Kai Wright, senior writer for The Root, and Dayo Olopade, political reporter for The Root, talk about the impact of the movie with Brian Lehrer.

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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.

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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.

Thomas Beller and Said Sayrafirzadeh visited The Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the new anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York. Thomas Beller is the editor of the anthology and the author of three books, Seduction Theory, The Sleep-Over Artist, and How To Be a Man. Said Sayrafirzadeh is the author of When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood and a contributor to Lost and Found. Guest host Mike Pesca conducted the interview.

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You can read Sayrafirzadeh's stories and hundreds more at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

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 ...

In his new film "Earth Days," director Robert Stone examines the early days of the environmental movement -- from rustlings in the 1950s to the first Earth Day in 1970 through the intense activism that followed. Here is an excerpt of Stone’s interview with ...

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.