-- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com this is "gps, the global public square." welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. first up on a great show, we'll tackle the three things your mother told you not to talk about with strangers, religion and politics and sex. catholicism, mormonism, islam, abortion, they are all playing a role in the 2012 election campaign. i have a great panel, including andrew sullivan and john meecham to talk about it. next, david versus goliath. what small nation is talking on the most populous nation in the world? i'll tell you. then the politics of outer space. america won the race to the moon, but that was 40 years ago. the u.s. is essentially sitting on the bench in the current space race. will that hurt it back here on earth?

and is america coming apart? that's what the author of a controversial new book says. i'll ask him about it. but first, here's my take. something caught my eye the other day. pat robertson, the high priest of the religious right, had some startling things to say about drugs. "i really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol," mr. robertson said recently. "i have never used marijuana, and i don't intend to," he said, "but it's just one of those things that, well, i think this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded." the reason robertson is for legalizing marijuana is that it has created a prison problem in america that is well beyond what most americans imagine. he's right. here are the numbers. the total number of americans under correctional supervision, prison, parole, et cetera, is 7.1 million, more than the entire state of massachusetts. no other country comes even close to our rates of incarceration. we have 760 prisoners per

100,000 people. most european countries have one-seventh that number per capita, so it's adjusted for population. even those on the high end of the global spectrum, brazil, poland, have only one-quarter of the number we do. if you say this is some kind of enduring aspect of america's wild west culture, you would be wrong. in 1980, our rates of incarceration were a quarter what they are now. what changed was the war on drugs and the mindless proliferation of laws that have created criminal penalties for anything and everything. if you don't believe me, listen to pat robertson again. >> we here in america make up 5% of the world's population, but we make up 25% of jailed prisoners. we have now over 3,000, a number that must be much higher than that, but over 3,000 federal

crimes, and every time the liberals pass a bill, i don't care what it involves, they stick criminal sanctions on it. and so we have the jails filled with people who are white collar criminals. >> in the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. in 2011, california spent $9.6 billion on prisons versus $5.7 billion on higher education. since 1980, california has built one college campus. it has built 21 prisons. the state spends $8,667 per student per year. it spends about $50,000 per inmate per year. why is this happening? well, prisons are a big business now. they are privately run. they have powerful lobbyists, and they have bought most state politicians in america. meanwhile, we are bankrupting our states and creating a vast

underclass of prisoners who will never be equipped for productive lives. i never thought i would say this, but god bless you, pat robertson. let's get started. > i promised you sex, religion, and politics. so, here it is all mixed up, as it is mixed up these days in the 2012 elections, and i have a great panel to talk about it. andrew sullivan blogs at the daily beast. he is a former editor of the "new republic." john meecham, from random house, formerly the editor at "newsweek." he is publishing a new biography of thomas edison, and if history is any indication, it will win the pulitzer prize. and matt frank is director of the center on religion and the

constitution at the witherspoon institute. welcome all. first, andrew, i have to ask you, as somebody who grew up in england, but grew up a devout catholic, you are watching these elections taking place all over the word. really, outside of the arab world, we are the only country in which religion is deeply embedded in the day to day political discourse. you look at england, france, germany. it would be unthinkable. >> yes. >> the only other place. if you watch the egyptian elections and american elections, there's a lot of religion. why? >> well, i think two things. one, that america has always had a much more religious public discourse and has always had more devoutly religious phenomena than the rest of the world, and i think that's partly because of the separation of church and state, which an old professor of mine at oxford used to say that he supported the church of england as a bull work against religion, and it certainly succeeded in england where there is an astonishing amount of unbelief and secularism.

i also think that this country is less secular than when i arrived 25 years ago. i do think that there has been a new development partly through the crisis of christianity and the modern world in which politicized christianity fusing with one political party is the new development, and certainly when you see, for example, the catholic hierarchy, basically coordinating with one political party in congress, or you see the notion that evangelicals will only really vote for one political party and not the other, and when you see a candidate like rick santorum absolutely saying that i am -- i see no separation between politics and religion that they are one in the same thing, and that is what my -- that is new. that is not something that was happening even 25 years ago. >> so when you look 25 years ago, john, i mean, one would

have thought superficially that there was more religion in politics in the sense of the religious right, jerry fallwell, pat robertson. all that seemed to die out, but andrew seems right. it's sort of in a strange way, i has entered the mainstream body politic as opposed to being on this fringe and liberty baptist college. >> i guess i would argue that i don't think it went away. i think that the press and popular politicians notice it with some episodic fervor, but you are talking about a country to go to andrew's point, where someone tried to rewrite the preamble to note our loyalty to jesus, and that was beaten back, a country that has long had an argument about whether there should be a constitutional amendment declaring us a christian nation. no president can plausibly talk about his candidacy, his life, his vision for the country, without an allusion to the all mighty, to some kind of with

-- with some kind of theocentric illusion. what is there -- and i think andrew got to it -- is you have an allegiance in which religion has become largely a partisan force. it has always been a political force. that's different than being a partisan force. this alliance with one party, which is something that started in 1980. remember, the first time most americans heard the word "evangelical" was when jimmy carter ran in 1976. that was the mainstreaming of that. you ended up as soon as 1988 with that with george herbert walker bush having to say that he was born again. i've always thought that he thought they were talking about mulligans, but he had to say that. right now what you're seeing, i think, is a republican party that feels utterly unenthusiastic about its frontrunner and is looking for passion and the passion in this case is coming from a very, very

conservative roman catholic. >> the passion is all in religion? >> i'm not sure i agree with this -- the country becoming less secular. i mean, i can't even think five years ago that people would actually admit that they were atheist, and now it's routine. people say, oh, i'm an atheist. it is. what i'm saying is that people are coming out as atheists and, you know, you have maybe 14% or 15% of the population basically saying that they are nonbelievers, and probably a lot more who are now moving away from the church. i mean, this whole move away from religion and towards spirituality, so i'm not sure that we are getting less secular. i think that what's happened is that the people who are campaigning, and these are mostly republicans, have been appealing to the base, and i don't think this will work in a general election. i think it's only -- will only work in a republican primary. where they're talking about

church and state in a way that is totally unamerican. rick santorum says we're a christian nation, and that he really doesn't believe in separation of church and state. what is he talking about? and then to go on and say he is an american. what he is espousing is the thing that they all hate the most, which is islam and the way -- and the islamic state, which is a theocracy. what sounds to me when they're talking about religion is that they want to make this country a theocracy, which is totally anti everything this country stands for. >> let me triangulate between sally and andrew here. i lean more towards sally's side in thinking that the country has not become more religion in the last half century. a half century ago, john f.

kennedy had to prove his bona fides as an american because there was something darkly not quite american about catholics in the eyes of many protestant leaders in this country, and his speech to the houston baptist ministers was his breakthrough that might have been decisive in that election, but there is a tradition of criticism of kennedy's speech going back even to john courtney murray at the time. you know, wondering if kennedy hadn't been too defensive, too distancing from his faith, and, you know, essentially promising to be uninfluenced by his religious upbringing as president. he declared himself -- i just reread the speech yesterday. he declared himself against an ambassador to the vatican, for instance. he declared that it would be somehow improper for pastors or prolats to try to influence the votes of the people or the -- or the actions of public officials. criticism is fairly widespread of this speech.

the great michael mcconnell, a former federal judge and not a catholic himself gave a talk at notre dame in which he roundly criticized kennedy's speech as contradicting many of the traditions of the freedom of religion. >> we'll pause for a break. promise you sex when we come back. we will get to sex, contraception. [ male announcer ] this one goes out to all the allergy muddlers. you know who you are. you can part a crowd, without saying a word. you have yet to master the quiet sneeze. you stash tissues like a squirrel stashes nuts. well, muddlers, muddle no more.

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and we are back with andrew sullivan, john meecham, sally quinn and matt frank. sally, in general, it seems as though the argument goes from liberal groups that by bringing up this contraception issue the republicans have kind of waged a war on women that every woman looks upon this and says why are these men telling us what we should do? do you think the feeling is as widespread that the republicans now have a serious problem with the women -- the woman vote if there is such a thing? >> i definitely do. i think that they have made a terrible mistake, and i don't know how they can rectify it.

as i was saying earlier about the primary versus the general election, it may play well during the primary. i mean, look after rick santorum started talking about women should basically stay at home and women should not be in combat. i don't think that that will be true in a general election. i think that the republicans have really hurt themselves. not just with democratic women, but if you look at 98% of catholic women who use contraception and 99% of women use contraceptions, the idea of saying, well, i would consider banning contraceptions and allowing states to ban contraception, it's just insane in terms of a politic strategy. i mean, you have over half the

population is women, and they're all using birth control. so, i don't understand how they think this is going to be a winning argument. >> but matthew, obviously, he must believe it. forget about the politics of it. this comes from a place of, you know -- >> there isn't any war on women involved here, and there isn't any war on access to contraception. and, you know, the premise of your question, fareed, was interesting. it's not the republicans who brought up contraception. it's the obama administration, which has promulgated an hhs mandate that all insurers, including many religious institutions and employers, cover contraception with no deductibles and no co-pays, and this is new. this is a new policy under obama care, and the catholic church and many other faith groups as well, are objecting to this as a serious assault on religious liberty. contrary to sally's view, i think the religious liberty issue is going to help the republicans in the fall. >> what do you think?

>> i think ultimately that conservatives are messing with the wall at their peril because the original metaphor came from richard hooker, the anglican divine. roger williams picked it up, the founder of rhode island. the idea of a wall of separation between church and state was not to protect the state from the church, but the church from the state. if every argument of domestic policy becomes explicitly religious, the american -- i think the american impulse is going to be to try to drive religion farther to the edges, producing a counterreaction and a very unpleasant situation. every argument does not have to have a theological component. >> what does contraception really have to do with religion? i mean, it is such a trivial matter. if people were in the public square arguing how their faith

in jesus has saved them, if they were arguing about the necessity for daily prayer, if they were bearing witness to their actual faith, then i don't think anybody would be concerned about this. that would be, in my view, a great thing. if i heard more catholic bishops actually arguing for the truth of our faith as opposed to seeking control things like contraception. and, let's face it, on that issue it is not the catholic church. it is the catholic hierarchy. most catholics disagree with the hierarchy and they have long since disagreed with them. it is the catholic hierarchy, the evangelical right. that's the weird thing. rick santorum hasn't won catholic votes. this is not about catholic conscience. 98% of them clearly don't have a conscience problem with contraception. they're not being -- their conscience isn't being violated whatsoever. my concern is that the church and the churches have become politicized.

they regard their primary, if you listen to how the bishops prepared for this moment, how they strategized for it, how they attempt to want to bring obama and make him a one-term president because of this, that is alienating a lot of ordinary catholics who actually want to be catholics. they don't want to be political operatives. >> well, i mean, i think all we have to do is look at a picture of all of those guys testifying. this is about celibate men making a decision for millions and millions and millions of women. and i think that picture alone will make a huge difference. you talk about it not being about -- contraception not being about religion, but they equate it to abortion because they talk about the morning after pill, which is in effect murder. and so once you get into abortion, which they consider some forms of contraception, then that becomes a whole different issue. it then becomes a religious issue for them, but i just wanted to say one more thing. when you are talking about this

whole issue of separation of church and state, obama is going to face a real problem in the fall because right now 15% to 20% of the people in this country believe that he is a muslim, but i think in this case the same people who, 15% or 20% who think that mormonism is evil, are the same 15% or 20% who think that obama is a muslim. i think this is going to be a really interesting sort of playoff. >> the last word. >> yeah. i'm glad that sally brought up the board of -- the morning after pill, ella, plan b, these are, in fact, abort efficients, and i think this is the cause of so many other groups joining the catholic church in regarding the hhs mandate as a serious inroad

on religious authority. abortion is also, i think, the reason why you see the republican party attracting religious people of morally conservative views. it's not that the religious right has somehow chosen the republican party as its vehicle for establishing some sort of theocracy. they've been essentially written out of the democratic party on a rail, tarred and feathered, and i think that a secular elite which regards abortion as a very important woman's right has simply captured the democratic party. it's virtually impossible to be a pro-life democrat anymore. >> we have to leave it at that. andrew sullivan, john meechum, sally quinn, matt frank, thanks for joining us. up next, what in the world? you have see china dominate smaller countries, but there's one small nation with a population of just 5 million that seems to be playing spoiler. i'll tell you who it is when we come back. that wrong didn't i? [ male announcer ] want great taste and whole grain oats that can help lower cholesterol? honey nut cheerios.

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now for our what in the world segment. in the playground of foreign affairs, you think that size

matters. the biggest bully always wins. that's often true, but i found it interesting to track one story of a relationship where size and clout didn't matter. the big country in question is china. as china has grown, they've been able to throw its weight around with its smaller neighbors. take the example of tiny nepal. it's sandwiched between two bigger powers, india and china. china is the world's second largest economy, and india ranks tenth. nepal is not even in the top 100. it often has to bow to the demands of its bigger, more powerful friends. while india has traditionally had more influence over it, that role is now switching to china. china has doubled aid to nepal. it's building roads there and a railway linking the two countries. obviously, china wants something in return, and it seems to be getting it. for the last two decades, thousands of tibetans have escaped to neighboring nepal every year, often heading onwards to india. that number has now dropped sharply to just a few hundred. as china tries to cement its control over tibet, it has asked nepal to police its border and stop tibetans from escaping. nepal has complied.

china's influence stretches far and wide. it is using its growing economic clout to influence countries as far afield as angola and zambia. sometimes, size isn't everything. china has met its match in a tiny country to the west. it has a population of just five million, about one-fourth that of the city of shanghai. like nepal, it begins with an n. the country is norway. you'll remember how in 2010, an independent norwegian panel gave the nobel peace prize to a chinese dissident. despite intense pressure from beijing, they made a decision they thought was right, but he was not allowed to go to oslo to receive his award, so the committee went ahead and presented the prize to an empty chair. beijing was not pleased. it decided to make oslo pay. it suspended talks on a free trade agreement and barred imports of salmon from norway. the two countries stopped talking. but beijing overstepped its reach.

china's economy may be 15 times the size of norway's, but it accounts for less than 2% of norway's exports. the two are 4,000 miles apart, and norway is an oil-rich country that is well run, invests in its people, and is thriving in the global economy. it doesn't need special favors from china. now consider this ironic twist. china wanted to bully norway to do its bidding, but now china wants to join the arctic council, a powerful forum which controls energy and security around the north pole. to do so, it needs the council's eight members to all vote yes. china really wants this membership so it can chart shorter routes to europe and discover new energy sources. well, guess who could vote no. norway. we always hear the narrative of how china's global cloud is increasing. but it needs to pick its battles carefully and handle them well. as america has learned over the

years, size matters, but so do smarts, and we'll be back. up next, we're going to get out of china and get macro, really macro, into matters of time and space. don't miss this. the astrophysicist neil degrass tyson joins me when we come back. i'm the first licensed indycar driver

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space, as "star trek" reminds us, is the final frontier, but is it the final frontier of earthbound conflict of a power struggle between the united states and china? that's what my next guest says. neil degrass tyson, the astrophysicist spends a lot of time looking and thinking about space. he is the director of the hayden planetarium here in new york. welcome, neil. >> thanks, fareed. >> when you wrote this article in "foreign affairs," what i was struck by -- >> it made a cover article. >> it was the cover essay. they talked about -- you talked in this article in "foreign affairs" about the fact that we were withdrawing from space, kind of limiting our ambitions at the very moment that china was amping up its program. are you really worried that we will actually lose the kind of leadership of space?

>> well, yes, but more important, there's a lot -- space is like proxy for a lot of what else goes on in society, including your urge to innovate. i mean, we are old enough, you remember in the time, the '60s and '70s where it was just expected that innovations transformed the world. who brings tomorrow into the present, if not the scientists and technologists and engineers? we had these great ambitions and it was a rather turbulent decade. the 1960s, the most turbulent since the civil war, for sure, with the civil rights movement and the assassinations, hot war, cold war. the once shining beacon in that period was the moon missions. and everything was possible. it was -- the world fair was in that decade. that was all about tomorrow. so if you lose your space edge, my deep concern is that you lose everything else about society that enables you to compete economically. of course, we went to the moon because of a military motivation

and that's why we stopped going anywhere beyond the moon because we saw that russia was done. they were not going to go to the moon. the dreamers back then were thinking that we went to the moon because we were explorers and if that were the case, of course, we would have continued on to mars. but we didn't. it was obvious in retrospect why we didn't. i would argue that today if we think of china as competition, economic competition, which they surely are, then to pull back on our space ambitions is a direct sort of lever arm on our capacity to compete economically. >> but if -- so one of the things you talk about in that article is that this is part of a general decline in science and engineering and decline of the kind of sexiness of science, but also the amount of time, energy we're putting into it. my question to you is why should we use this indirect path to science? if we want to fund science, why not fund science?

>> that's a common question that always gets asked. what happens is when you approach the world that way, you find a problem, and you say, well, let's put some money to do more what the solution is to that problem. what they amount to are like band-aids on each little problem. today we need more scientists so let's make better science teachers. put a little band-aid there. we need -- we want to keep our jobs. let's make incentives for corporations to not move their manufacturing plant. a little band-aid there. you go around and you put all these band-aids down, and you are ignoring a deeper engine that could be operating that would solve all those problems simultaneously. >> you worry a lot about the fact that people are getting very cost conscience and very -- and really cutting back, and you tell the story about the hubbell telescope. explain why it's important and

what happened. >> well, in that particular case, the hubbell telescope, when it was launched, the mirror had the wrong curvature to it. images were fuzzy. it would be a little while before we could get that repair with corrective optics. what do you do? >> it's up there. in space. >> you got to, like, mount a mission to go work on it. be clever about how you design the corrective because that problem was not anticipated before hubbell was launched. you had to be really clever about what you pulled out and what you swapped in. and so there was some time -- downtime, if you will, where you could get data, but it was kind of fuzzy data. what do you do? you don't want to waste it. so an algorhythm was developed to extract as much information as you possibly can from these fuzzy images of stars, and that exercise, that was shared with a medical doctor who specialized in breast cancer research, and he noted that finding these dots of light in an otherwise sort of fuzzy environment was exactly what he does visually when he is looking for early detection -- early detection of breast cancer in the mammograms. so they apply this algorhythm, and now he they have early

detection of breast cancer doing a better job than the human eye was able to do. you can't script that. that happens all the time. this crosspollenation of fields. innovation in one, stimulating revolutionary changes in another. if you only want to put money to a problem, you can tend to make evolutionary changes, small increments, but the big changes come about when all the -- i'm not saying just through space. you need all the sciences. quick note, all the machines in a hospital that have an on/off switch brought into the service of diagnosing the condition of the human body without cutting you open? they're all based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. from the x-ray machine, one of the earliest of these diagnostic tools, to the entire department of radiology, to -- >> it's all about light waves. >> that and energy out of the atom.

with mri, the p.e.t.-scans. physicists just doing physics. if you say i want to be healthier, let's put more money in the medical community. no, you have to put money everywhere, but in the school system and in the culture of society, what drives ambitions? there's nothing that drives ambitions the way nasa does. and today's nasa portfolio taps biologists, because we're looking for mars, life on mars, chemists and physicists and electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, all the traditional stem fields that science, technology, engineering and math fields are stoked when you dream big in agencies such as nasa. and it's not that much money. right now it's a half a penny on your tax dollar. i say double it to a penny. then we go to mars in a big way in short term. it becomes a big, visible project. school kids know about it. and who is that first astronaut class? today in middle school today, why not -- i got an idea. let's select them now, and then we all can track and see how they're eating well or getting

through grades? that's tomorrow's mercury 7. >> what would we learn? what is your hope about the mars mission? this is -- i mean, part of it is symbolic, but part of it you think there's a lot to learn by going to mars. >> as a scientist i want to go to mars and back to resides and the moon because i'm a scientist, but i can tell you i'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space. nasa was created in a geopolitical climate. we were spooked by sputnik. sputnik itself was a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile. with the missel removed, put in a radio transmitter. everybody said it's going beep. the military knew the implication of this. the space station itself, the initial impetus was russia is building their own space station. i don't have a problem with geopolitical arguments for going into space. let all the reasons reveal themselves. tourism. let the private sector. go take care of that. i don't have any problems with that, and scientists, send me to mars. >> would you go? >> i would so go to mars. to low earth orbit, no. i'm boldly going where hundreds

have gone before, no. if you are going to go where nobody has gone before, sign me up. i'll bring my whole family and sign me up. >> neil degrass tyson, a pleasure to have you on. >> thanks for having me. >> we will be back. you go ask a woman in a white working class neighborhood why she isn't married, even though she has a child, and she will say to you very quickly, she'll say why should i marry those losers? >> announcer: this is the day. the day that we say to the world of identity thieves "enough." we're lifelock, and we believe you have the right to live free from the fear of identity theft. our pledge to you? as long as there are identity thieves, we'll be there. we're lifelock.

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my next guest is the author of what some are calling the most important book of the year. charles murray's "coming apart" is about the divide between america's upper class elite and the white working class. he has a track record of writing controversial books. he also authored "the bell curve" eight years ago about the role of intelligence in american society. he joins me now. welcome. so, the simple picture i think that you are providing is a kind of divide between an upper middle class and the working white population and the divide goes along the lines of, first of all, success and such, but almost behavior characteristics, moral characteristics, the upper

class tend to be bourgeois, married, work hard, and increasingly what do you find about the working class, or the poor? >> that it has moved away from those things. fareed, the important thing is that it didn't used to be that way. i'm not saying that 50 years ago there were no classes. we had rich people, and we had poor people, but take marriage as a classic example. in 1960 working class, which i'm defining as high school education working in a low-skill job or blue collar skill job. 83% of them were married ages 30 to 49, okay? it was the norm. for the upper middle class, it was in the 90s. it was a little bit higher, but not much. as of 2010 you're down to 48% of white working class adults who are married. that's a phenomenal change within 50 years, in an absolutely crucial social institution. >> the upper class? >> they're at 84%. there was a little decline up there, but not much. and so you've had a divergence on this.

what i call industriousness, crucial american value whereby in 1960, it was taken for granted by all adult males, they were supposed to work. they were either working or they were looking for work. that was true among the working class and the upper middle class. as of 2008, before the recession set in, that was up to about one out of eight white working class adult males wasn't even looking for work. they were out of the labor force. >> when i look at america, particularly in comparison to other places, it seems still a place where the bourgeois values that you value are very strong. i mean, this is a country in which politicians have to take pains to point out that they are married, have good family lives, they love their country, they are regular people. as you know, it's not true in many other countries in the world. nobody campaigns with their wives. you know, don't you still think that if the issue is one of the signals we as a society are transmitting, we're still

sending a signal that what we value are the bourgeois virtues that you described. >> i think what you have to do to get a sense of what's gone on in the white working class is the little anthropological participation. i have a chapter in "coming apart" which draws an excellent dissertation that did that, from a town called fishtown. and you don't have to dig very deep to hear stories about the kinds of cultural breakdown i'm talking about. you go ask a woman in a white working class neighborhood why she isn't married even though she has a child, and she will say to you, very quickly she'll say why should i marry those losers? the guys here may be nice guys, but they can't hold on to a job. they can't be relied upon. that kind of statement and other statements of social disorganization don't have to be pried out of people. they reflect day to day life in

working class america. >> your solution, which has been somewhat controversial, has been caricatured as of getting rid of all the welfare programs and have the upper class go into the ghettos and lecture the poor whites on the needs for better morals. >> well, may i say first that the caricature of the solution is, indeed, a caricature, and i don't see anything like that. i'm saying we have a cultural problem here, and it's only going to be changed by changing the culture. and changing the culture is a very evanescent thing. what i say about what the upper middle class should do is, it should start preaching what it practices. right now, you have the upper middle class engaged in marriage, behaving, by and large, honestly. they are more religious than the working class, even though that's declined and the upper middle class as well, and they work like crazy, they're very

industriousness. but they are also extremely nonjudgmental. so, for example, there is no way in polite society to talk about the problem of the single parent family, in any way that says, you know, actually, the two-parent family is a better family structure for raising children. it's a significantly better structure, and we know this from a whole lot of data. you can't say that. because people then feel, well, i'm being mean to single women who are trying very hard to raise their children well, and there are lots of single women who are doing a good job of raising their children. but as a statistical phenomenon, births to single women are really problematic. you can't say that given the culture. we have to have some ways that you can start to say that, without demonizing women, but we've got to have ways of once again having norms that support the kind of civic culture that america has had. so preaching what you practice does not mean going into the

slums of the bull horn. it does mean starting to say that there are ways of living a satisfying life that have not only worked for me, but are fundamentally sound institutions for living a satisfying life. and changing that culture does not lend itself to prescriptive measures. writing a book is the only thing i can do to push it along. >> charles murray, a pleasure to have you on. >> i've enjoyed it. thank you. >> and we will be back. nk any battery will do... consider the journey of today's athletes: ♪ their training depends on technology. [ beeping, ticks ] and when their devices are powered by a battery, there are athletes everywhere who trust duracell so whether they're headed for london or the journey has just begun... they rely on copper to go for the gold. duracell. trusted everywhere. water,

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at meineke i have options... like oil changes starting at $19.95. my money. my choice. my meineke. april is upon us, and that brings me to my question of the week from the gps challenge. in earlier times, april 1st signified what holiday? i promise you, this isn't an april fools joke. it is, a, new year's day, b, st. kris pin's day, c, u.s. election day, or d, christmas day. stay tuned and we'll tell you the right answer. go to cnn.com/fareed for more. if you miss a show, go to itunes where you can get the audio podcast for free and you can now buy the video podcast. this week's book of the week is

from my guest from earlier, jon meacham. it is his first book, "franklin and winston: an intimate portrait of an epic friendship." the prime minister and the president had a lot in common, but they were also quite different. but they did work together to win the second world war. it's a beautiful portrait of a friendship of politics and it's written beautifully. really worth reading. now for the last look. calcutta, the city of joy, is best remembered in black and white as the one-time capital of the british raj. it's a city also associated with the color red. after all, it was ruled by the communist party for 34 years. but last year they were voted out. in its place is a firebrand populist leader who is promising a new city with new policies. well, forget about black and white or red, she wants to paint the city blue. yes, literally. all of the official buildings of

calcutta are to be painted blue. even the city's iconic yellow taxis and highway dividers. it's because they see blue as the color of optimism, it's the color of the sky. i think it's probably much more simple than that. it's the opposite of red, in a sense. the next time you worry about how particularized america is, divided into red and blue states. it could be worse. just think of calcutta. the correct answer to our gps challenge question was, at a, until the 16th century, new year's day was celebrated on april 1st with spring symbolizing the new year. they were on to something, much more than the frigid cold temperatures we usually get on january 1st. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. hello, everyone. i'm fredricka whitfield with a check of our top stories. u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton says sanctions against

syria are working. she tells cnn the so-called friends of syria group formed a committee to coordinate those sanctions and cut off the leadership's ability, quote, to wage war on its own people. a nobel peace laureate aung san suu kyi wins a role in the parliament. the official results will probably come out tomorrow. suu kyi spent years under house arrest and her party was banned during her struggle for democracy in myanmar. the country has been under military rule for 50 years. a new cdc study finds that 1 in 88 children have a former of autism. that's up nearly 80% from a decade ago. coming up at the half hour, we're digging into this new research and we'll examine the enormous financial strain on families and bring you solutions. i'm fredricka whitfield. see you in 30 minutes. right now, dr. sanjay gupta's "the list" starts right now.