probably not. and what do we know about them? so the story is this window in the world of other samples. >> host: do you see a broader book on the horizon? >> guest: no way. no. i don't think -- the only thing that is different about henrietta's story from all those other people is her name is out there and we know who she is. there's privacy concerns would keep you from ever releasing names of any of the other lines. so there's no sort of -- there's plenty of my friends who say, now you're going to spend the rest of your life writing books about each of the cell lines, and i'm not. the story woos not be the same. ...

something like this could happen but it doesn't surprise me because i have the exact reaction everyone is having, the basic facts of the story are so incredible you hear them and just go what? i have to know what happened and tell people about this and that is exactly what i said when i

heard it. so i feel like the way the book is taken off is very much about the story and the facts and so yeah, there is a way in which i can actually see that and separate from this thing i did because it's the facts of the story people are responding to i think. >> where do you live? what is your day job and where did you grow up? >> right now live in memphis, tennessee. i've been teaching at the university the last three years in the creative writing program. i grew up in portland, oregon, and i have lived in lots of places. i went to undergraduate school in fort collins florida and in grad school in pittsburgh and lived in new york. i've moved around a lot. >> y buy ecology? what interested you about biology? >> it was actually i was pre-vet. i was on of those kids obsess with animals and by the time was 5i was going to be a veterinarian so i was very one

who threw coatrack so i was interested in science and medicine but it was very much this in the goal of being a vet. >> do you feel like henrietta lacks is a friend of yours? >> i definitely feel like she is a huge part of my life and yeah, there is this sense in which deborah, her daughter, believes that henrietta lacks is out there and free much alive in the universe with these cells and she's been biding my life, like i am a pub it -- puppet. a lot of what happens in my life is because henrietta lacks does or does not want it and so yeah, henrietta lacks is a constant presen in lif >> rebecca skloot is the author, crown is the publisher, the moral life of henrietta lacks is the book. rebecca skloot is the author of the immortal life of henrietta lacks. she served as the vice president on the board of directors of the

national book critics circle where she developed a blog of critical mass. her writings appeared in "the new york times" magazine and columbia journalism review. the virginia festival of the book hosted this event. to find out more, visit vabook.org. matthew crawford, would you do for a living? >> in number of things. one of them is fix motorcycles, and that's kind of what the book is about. but more broadly, it is an attempt to speak up for the manual trades and suggest that can be a life worth choosing. >> where is your motorcycle shop? >> it's in richmond, virginia. >> what is it called? >> shockomoto. i work on japanese and british bikes. these are mostly vintage bikes, vintage cache that makes people willing to spend money on them

and it's a very small operation. islamic any reason in particular that you don't work on harleys? [laughter] >> yeah, people ask me sometimes why i don't work on harleys, and why generally say is i work on motorcycles, not lifestyles. i'm not qualified to help them with their lifestyle issues, it is beyond my competence. >> what is soulcraft? >> the title on the book is a play on a george will that cannot 20 years ago. his was statecraft and i thought it was funny to replace henrietta lacks with soulcraft but i guess if pressed to define it would be like education, the forming of the souls. >> what does that mean? >> often we think of education in a fairly narrow terms of

requiring may be a narrow set of technical skills. apply think most people would agree that education entails some kind of education of the affections, disconnected, actually can be connected to the acquiring of technical skills and that is something i explore in the book how becoming competent at building things and fixing things can actually cultivate certain virtues we normally think of as ethical virtues. >> such as? >> individual responsibility. when you are dealing with material stuff, it generally lets you know right away if you have gotten something wrong and mistakes can be quite high fixing people's motorcycles if you get it wrong someone could get hurt or you could hurt

yourself so there's a kind of keen awareness of catastrophe as this possibility that is always hovering over your shoulder, and it tends to meet you get absorbed in your work in a kind of heat for way that i like. >> what was the theme of your ph.d. thesis? >> it was on ancient political fault. so plutarch was the main character. there is no real connection between that and this book in case you would ask. >> i wanted to ask how you go from a phd thesis, the head of a think tank in washington, to owning a motorcycle shop. that's not a normal career track. >> right. it's actually not quite bizarre as many people seem to think. i keep hearing from people who

are sort of refugees from either academia or some kind of, you know, sort of knowledge work and who are doing things in the trade. there's quite a few of them them out there and it's been great to hear from them. in my own case, i try to get an academic job and did not. there is such a glut of ph.d. s as you know. i did land the job of the think tank -- >> which one? >> i'm not going to say. and i hated it from day one. >> why? >> well, this was a policy organization, and like any such place it had taken certain positions. and so, there were some facts that we were more fond of than others and so the job sometimes seemed to require that i reason backwards as it were from some

desired conclusion to a suitable premises and as the figurehead of this think-tank, i found myself making largesse i didn't by myself and the was demoralizing and by contrast, fixing motorcycles you answer to standards that are not open to controversy or interpretation. the bich either starts and run rights or it doesn't. i like about it. you might say the quotient is quite low. and it serves as a kind of check on your own the subject to the you might say because you do have this extra will objective standard. >> are think tanks important to our system of governance in america? >> i frankly don't understand what the think tank as supposed to be.

often when you have is, speaking in general here, they will serve the interests of one sort or another with a radiological or material, of but have to present what they do in terms of science and that is some of them to very valuable work. in my own case, i felt like there was a certain cognitive style that was demanded in this environment and the style demanded by projecting an image of rationality, but not indulge too much in actual reasoning because it could lead off in the wrong direction. so it was sort of the -- it was not tall like a genuine academic inquiry and in that sense it was quite disillusioning whereas fixing motorcycles is genuinely

rational often frustrating but never a rational. >> what is a stochastic? >> meaning it has an element of randomness and it is a term that aristotle uses to describe medicine. so the doctor is dealing with bodies, which he did not make himself unlike a builder who builds a house. if you aren't building a house, every element you can sort of see and please deliberately so if the building falls down, you can say in retrospect the builder didn't know what he was doing. but a doctor deals with sillier every day even an excellent doctor. he's dealing with materials that are not fully within his mastery. and the reason i think this is important from one thing there

is the parallel with mechanical work and the important point here is that working with things that resist mastery in that way i think tends to chasten an easy fantasy of mastery that is pervasive of modern culture. we often view technology as a magical thing that in powers us in various ways and whereas the person who actually fix this stuff has a different relationship to it. it is a more solid kind of command based on their real understanding but paradoxically i think it also chastens this self absorbed fantasy of mastery that permeates the consumer culture. >> you write to those who belong to a certain order of society, people who make big decisions that affect all of us don't seem

to have much sense of their own infallibility. >> do you agree? >> i would just like you to explain that a little bit more. >> well i was wrapping up the book at the very end of the book where you quoted they're just as the financial crisis was becoming this extraordinary thing of that seemed to call into question a lot of the suppositions we had about our culture and there was this revelation i think that whole swaths of the economy were predicated on a kind of parallel universe that had a kind of taken leave from reality. and i think the irresponsibility that we now see was going on in wall street for example, will not for example of the central thing here was facilitated by a

kind of abstraction from this primary kind of economic activities that wall street was tracking. there were so many layers of slicing and dicing of these securitized things that allowed people in that world to be removed from the consequences of their actions. and so, you know, maybe if the people in that position had spent the summer learning trades and smashed their thumbs a few times with a hammer, north know, maybe it would cultivate a bit more of a kind of ethic of individual responsibility. >> what do you mean when you write that people who promote free markets for debt that we mean the three -- three minn?

>> i think we've developed a kind of fetish of free-market. i don't know, you can locate it variously. but i think the reason that we ought to care about free-market is that what we want hour well informed people capable of independent reasoning and also a kind of economic independence. and when capital it's so concentrated that it pre-empts opportunities for self employment, buy people in small business, the small tradesmen or shopkeepers, then you really have a kind of concentration of power of the sort that conservatives haven't been contented to. we worry about the concentration of government power but not the concentration of capital and

commercial power. and if you think about it, so much of our lives are ordered by economic forces more than by government forces. so, it seems an oversight that people obviously have to give up very much in the last to be here as i think so there's a lot of fresh thinking about this. >> who is alan blinder and why do you quote him in the book? >> he is an economist alan blinder -- princeton, excuse me. he has made a very interesting argument about -- ki argues the distinction is emerging in the labor market is not the conventional one between those with more education and those with less. rather it is between those who have a service that can

delivered over a wire, versus those who have to deliver on site or in person. and it's of the latter who are going to find their livelihood more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. so as he puts it can't hammer a nail over the internet, where as radiologists, for example, now find themselves competing with radiologists in india because an image can be transmitted electronically. you know, 30 years ago we learned anything that can be put in a box and then on a container ship is going to be made aware of the labor is cheapest, which turns out to be not here. it's china. and in the last ten years a similar logic has immersed for the products of intellectual labor. accountants face of this thread of outsourcing, programs, and editors. but the indians can't fix your car for you because they are in

india. so trades that are tied to concrete sites have a certain security to them that makes them attractive. >> and he also says we are just the beginning of this trend, this -- >> he seems to be seeing a large disruption in the economy. this is all based on an article in foreign affairs he wrote a few years back. i think other economists have taken up this insight. and the upshot seems to be that, you know, for years we've been telling young people that a four year degree is the course to financial security. it remains true those with a four year degree earn more, quite a bit more than those without. but you have to disaggregate the categories a little bit and if you compare the person who gets a four year degree in sociology say to the person who gets his masters to get as an electrician and compare their income, you know, five, ten years down the road i think you'll find the

electrician does pretty well. >> so what are your thoughts about higher education in the states today? >> worthwhile? >> i am a huge fan of book learning. there is occasionally been confusion that may be the book is an antiintellectual statement. it's not at all. there are great reasons to go to college i think if you can spare for years and a fair bit of money to do it, the life of the mind is great. but it's also true that the life of the mind doesn't take place only on college campuses. both because in fact you can read challenging books outside of college but more importantly, work itself can be, and i mean working in the trades can be intellectually very demanding and stimulating.

so i am really trying to make -- trying to defend the life of the mind by pointing out that they can be connected to real things. so i see this focus continuous with my love of higher education, provided that we don't sell students a kind of bill of goods and push them into it for the wrong reasons. and also people are suited to different kinds of work. we've developed a kind of educational monoculture where just about every kid gets, you know, hustle off to college and then on to a certain track where you in that working in a cubicle and i think the truth is some people including some who are plenty smart would rather be learning to build things or fix things. and we should honor that. >> what do you think when you hear the phrase knowledge base

of society or information age >> i think it is part of the hype. we had this idea that a rose in the 90's that somehow we are going to be gliding around in a pure information economy. and accordingly, shop classis were quietly dismantled in the 90's to make room for computer class is. i first became aware of this issue when i realized that there was a lot shop equipment on ebay sold machines, table saws, and i guess the reason was disturbing to see this stuff sitting in warehouses is the disappearance of the tools from our common education i think is the first step towards the white ignorance

of things, how they are made and how to repair them and parallel to that there is in fact a kind of design philosophy that emerged where the point seems to be tied the works so for example if you lift the hood on some cars now there's essentially a motherhood under the hood and i am not sure what the thinking is may be the site of the alternator would offend us somehow. so it's become harder to get a handle on your own stuff and be self-reliant because changes in material culture. they didn't even have a dipstick so you couldn't check your own the oil level with you wanted to and i know i'm not the only person who is creeped all by this. some cars if your oil of level gets low an e-mail from some

place. now, to go down that threat a little bit it used to be in addition to a dipstick you had something called an idiot lights and was called an idiot like for a reason. we had a harsh judgment of anyone so involved in their own car they let it get to the point that light is coming on. but there is some weird cultural logic whereby idiocy is a lack of involvement and is recast as something desirable. it's an indication of the technological progress, and of course it is a kind of progress when you no longer have to mess around with dipsticks and dirty rags but they also want to notice there is a kind of moral education and material culture that can go in various directions so the way things are

going currently, it often feels like the modern personality is getting reform on the basis of passivity and dependents. there is a few were occasions to be directly responsible for your own physical environment with that i think comes less expectation of responsibility. >> how many of your customers at shockomoto know that you've written a best seller? >> the word seems to have gotten out for the most part. >> do you have the book displayed in the front window of the shop for sale? >> no but it's been good for business. >> when did you decide to write this and are you surprised at how it took off? >> i'm very surprised. it started as just an article that i wrote and i didn't think you'd go any further but the

response was widely appreciatively read, the article that is, so the opportunity to turn into a book was represented to the eckert presented and would be a nice thing to do. >> has it been picked up by? >> not that i know of. >> any business schools using it? >> i've heard from a couple of professors who seem interested in the signing of the class is. >> what do you think about that? is a how-to manual? >> no, it's not a whole to manual. >> is a management tool? >> it is deeply critical of the very idea of management actually

as a kind of science of manipulation which has taken on cannae forms in recent decades. >> such as? >> the manager appears not so much as a straightforward box but a kind of their past or life coach. there's a kind of smarmy quality to a lot of contemporary management. i notice mostly from reading sociological literature on management. i haven't been subjected to that in recent years but the picture that emerges that it's like an authority can't present itself straightforward coming down from a superior it house to present itself as a friendly volunteerism, jury egalitarian which i think makes it all the

more kind of creepy. >> what about politics? how would "shop class as soulcarft" -- hawken utah get into politics and politicians? >> it doesn't -- it doesn't really speak to politics in the narrow sense of republicans versus democrats or on that level. but i do try to articulate at the very end in the brief sketch of something like progressive republicanism, small 'r', that would take its bearings from our share of capacity to realize what is best in the human condition, and with attentiveness to how that's very much a function of the economy, being able to find a good work

and being space for that in the economy and a sort of take that as the touchstone for politics in so far as our political decisions affect the economy. so in other words, in the case for of entrepreneurship and making that bible. and i have to say that one thing that's quite important for that is health care. i would not have been able to go into business if it were not for the fact that my wife had a job with health care, and i think there's a lot of people out there who that is the stumbling block. >> you can read his book or he will fix your motorcycle, "shop class as soulcarft" an inquiry into the value of work by matthew crawford.

james finnegan recalls his time as a vietnam surgeon in 1967 and 68 where he headed the team of doctors. dr. finnegan, wounded during the war was awarded a purple heart and bronze star. the army and navy club in washington is the host of this event. it's about 50 minutes. >> this is a singular honor for me tonight. i want to first say how humbled by and by this whole event. we've stayed here before. i am well aware