jeffrey brown has the latest addition to our newshour bookshelf. >> brown: nora pouillon's day begins early. tending to the herb garden at her washington, d.c. restaurant named "nora," and then working through the menu with her chefs. on this day it featured gingery carrot soup with creme fraiche grilled sustainable salmon with roasted parsnips, rapini minneola orange ginger vinagrette and bittersweet molten chocolate cake. it's all part of running a restaurant, and a special one at that: the nation's first certified organic restaurant. >> you have to learn about the season, you have to learn about the agriculture, you have to learn about the chemistry of food. you have to learn to have a budget, you have to learn about food cost, about labor cost. every day is like nearly show time, will all the people show up? >> brown: pouillon's new book, "my organic life", tells how she got there: growing up on a farm in the austrian alps and later vienna. then moving in the 1960s with her then husband, a frenchman, to the united states, where she was shocked by the highly- processed, hormone-inf

jeffrey brown visits the new whitney museum in new york. >> brown: like all buildings, it begins as a construction site. >> everything needs to be ready, so there will be a moment when... >> brown: and when we visited the new whitney museum recently, work was still going on all around. architect elisabetta trezzani managed the project with world- renowned museum builder renzo piano. on a large outdoor terrace, she showed us how she and her colleagues thought of their mission here. >> to create places that are connected with the neighborhood and all the city. >> brown: so the city is the canvas in a way. >> yes exactly. >> brown: and what a neighborhood this is, or was. trezzani told me of her first time here. >> when we came there was only meat packing on this street, there was working 24 hours. and there was blood on the street. >> brown: there was blood on the streets? >> yes. >> brown: this is new york's meatpacking district, long a busy and messy and once- dangerous area where few residents or tourists ventured. now, it's a bustling neighborhood in a new way-- of restaurants and h

jeffrey brown has our conversation. >> brown: the u.s. remains an overwhelmingly christian country. that hasn't changed, but a new survey shows a significant drop in the number of americans who identify as christian. the survey was done by the pew research center. it showed that in 2007, 78% of americans identified as christian. by last year, the percentage had dropped to under 71%. those years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of americans who say they are religiously unaffiliated, from 16 to nearly 23%. the largest drop was in mainline protestant denominations, but the number of catholics also fell. several non-christian religions, islam and hinduism, saw modest gains. alan cooperman is director of religious research at pew. also with us is reverend serene jones president of the union theological seminary in new york city. welcome to both of you. alan cooperman, let me start with you. one aspect of this that might surprise people is just how widespread this drop is. did that strike you? >> absolutely, jeff. i mean, i think the important thing for people the realize, this is

for the pbs newshour, i'm jeffrey brown. >> ifill: now, another addition of the newshour bookshelf.s a story somewhat lost to history. how the united states expanded after the revolutionary war into the deep south. steve inskeep, co-host of npr's morning edition, has the details in "jacksonland: president andrew jackson, cherokee chief john ross, and a great american land grab." judy woodruff talked to him last week at bus boys and poets, a bookstore and restaurant in the d.c. area. welcome. >> it's a delight to be here. >> woodruff: so you report from all over the world. you tell stories from so many parts of the globe, and yet you also really love american history. that comes through in this book. >> well, thank you. i wanted to go back to the beginning in a sense and i ended up doing this story which is set in the 1820s and '30s, a period when democracy as we know it, the democratic institutions we know began the take shape. and so it's a really exciting period of american history even though i found a really dark story there. >> woodruff: but it's a particular part of that perio

jeffrey brown reports on that part of his ongoing work on "culture at risk." >> brown: the cremationntinued this week in kathmandu, as officials warned the death toll could hit 10,000. meanwhile aid workers have struggled to reach remote areas, hampered by customs delays, closed roads and difficult terrain. and villagers have grown frustrated by the pace and amount of relief getting to them. >> ( translated ): it is so little, what can one do with this? some have 15 to 20 people in their families, and some have but for 10 to 15 people, how long will it last? it won't last. >> brown: the humanitarian crisis-- the loss of lives, the need for food, shelter, and medicine-- has been devastating in this mountainous country that is one of the world's poorest. at the same time, another kind of crisis has also unfolded. this region once stood at the intersection of trade routes connecting india and china, and became home to a rich heritage of art and architecture dating back many centuries. today, many of those sites, such as bhaktapur square and patan durbar square, both in the kathmandu val

jeffrey brown has the story from minneapolis. >> i'm going to have you walk to the bridge and when you person in an orange shirt, the show has begun. >> brown: i wasn't quite sure what to expect. i'd been told to meet with performers from the dance group "body cartography" at loring park in downtown minneapolis. i think i've arrived at the performance. but it was all very mysterious, especially when this man in an orange shirt began to dance and he seemed to be dancing just for me. was i supposed to join in? confusing me a bit, it turned out, was intentional. >> there's a lot of playing with you and your comfort and discomfort, to engage you physically in what's happening. >> brown: there is discomfort there for a lot of people. >> yeah. >> brown: this personal one-on- one dance is part of what's touted as a new kind of art commerce-- e-commerce to be precise. the seller is a very prominent museum: the walker art center in minneapolis. emmet byrne is the walker's design director, and one of the creators of this so-called "intangible" shopping experience. >> in essence, we're selling id

jeffrey brown has the story. >> brown: it began during world war one and wouldn't end until the 1970s movement of six million african-americans from the rural south to the urban north changed america forever. the epic story is the subject of an epic work of art: the "migration series" by jacob lawrence, himself the son of southern migrants, who studied photographs and news and scholarly accounts before lifting a brush. >> the thing about lawrence is that he's deeply read. >> brown: curator leah dickerman has brought together all 60 of lawrence's small paintings for an exhibition, titled "one way ticket," at new york's museum of modern art. it's a chance to see the entire work, from the hardships of life in the south, to the long journey from home, and the new life that awaited, one that included opportunity, but also new struggles. each panel comes with a brief barebones caption. >> there's an extraordinary emotional range to this work of art between scenes of great tenderness and intimacy: an image of saying grace before the most spare and impoverished meal, an image of a woman readi

our own jeffrey brown is in cuba all this week, reporting on what the opening up of cuba means for that country. and chief foreign affairs correspondent margaret warner has been following the progress of the talks here. we welcome both of you. margaret, you have been following the talks. what's the latest? >> the latest is they've wrapped up for the day and there is still no deal. this is the fourth time they've met over the fairly confined issue of opening up embassies in each other's capitals and it's proved tougher than they thought. it's encouraging today the two negotiators are having back-to-back news conferences here in washington tomorrow. some concern that they may be dragging their feet. the u.s. has not gotten satisfaction on what it wants to open an embassy which is u.s. diplomats can travel around the the country to cuba, two that they can receive equipment, documents and secure containers and three president castro threw in a new issue last week which he was critical of the pro democracy programs u.s. runs out of the intersection which trains independent journalists, for e

jeffrey brown has more. >> brown: the report repeatedly singles out brady's connection with two patriotsemployees and implies he requested footballs below the standard level. it also includes numerous text messages with those employees that suggest brady complained about the air pressure in regular season games. this exchange came after a game against the jets in october 2014. we've deleted profanities. a team employee in charge of delivering the football texted: "tom sucks... i'm going make that next ball a... balloon." an assistant texted back: "talked to him last night. he actually brought you up and said you must have a lot of stress trying to get them done.. ." mike pesca joins us again. he's the host of the "slate" podcast called "the gist" and a contributor to npr so more probable than not, right, that balls were tampered with, mike, that's the key phrase used here? >> oh yes. some people may be dissatisfied with that because it doesn't comport with anything in our legal system except what was the standard of proof for a report like this? any reasonable person would read this and

jeffrey brown has the latest from the newshour bookshelf. >> brown: in december 2013, a young woman namedne sacco wrote this tweet: "going to africa. hope i don't get aids. just kidding. i'm white." she hit "send" and out it went to her 170 followers. >> she got on the plane, turned off her phone, woke up 11 hours later and discovered that her life was utterly destroyed. >> brown: she was a twitter sensation. >> the worldwide number one. >> brown: in the worst way. >> in the worst way. it was hundreds of thousands of tweets along the lines of "we're about to get this woman fired in real time before she even knows she's being fired." >> brown: the blitz of online outrage did indeed lead sacco's company to fire her. she said later she thought was making a joke about her own privilege. but that's not how the twitterverse heard it. her story is just one of many told in the new book "so you've been publicly shamed." the author is jon ronson, a man who knows his way around twitter-- he has 112,000 followers and has sent out more than 45,000 tweets himself. so we're in a renaissance of public sh

jeffrey brown recently sat down with him at busboys and poets a local washington bookstore. >> brown:ty, welcome. >> thanks for having me. >> brown: this is a solo skewering. humor of racial politics. what set you off? what are you responding to? >> i'm just kind of responding to myself, i guess. it's not like there is some impetus that i have to write about that. it's stuff that i have been thinking about for a long time. i have been thinking about segregation for some reason. i think i had read something about somebody saying oh, black people are better off under segregation and i just went, that would be so fun to try to see how segregation would work now in a weird kind of guy. >> brown: so your nameless character, young back man, he tries to resegregate his city in a sense. >> yeah. >> brown: strangely enough. he doesn't know he's doing that and that the city is already segregated. >> brown: it is segregated. in many different ways. >> brown: as is much of our life today. >> exactly. it's interesting in the book how acknowledging that you're being segregated changes your behavior

family members tell us the victims are 31-year-old jennifer jeffrey brown and her son kester brown iii. >> councilman you're very familiar with this case. how is it affecting the community? >> well young kester is a student i had the pleasure of meeting, going to baltimore national academy. he was in language immersion and her entire community is heartbroken, and we cannot have cowards and the people that are lowest on the earth going around killing our babies. as i said everybody, everybody that calls himself a human, everyone who calls himself a man in our town should be hunting down information and hunting down this individual so we can bring him to justice because this is the kind of thing we cannot accept and this kind of violence is unacceptable. it's unacceptable when you kill anyone, but when you're taking out women and babies then it's time for us to say enough is enough, and people are still going to cower in their homes, particularly men in their communities are going to cower in their home and go on facebook and social media and say that's messed up. that's not enough. we n

jeffrey brown has the story. >> brown: the two are considered the best fighters of their generation. brown: manny "pacman" pacquiao is already a national hero in his native philippines, even a member of its congress. floyd "money" mayweather is undefeated, the highest-paid athlete in the world. saturday's fight is nearly a decade in the making, with competing camps, lawsuits, rival promoters and warring cable networks all stopping the bout before it started. until now. wednesday afternoon, amid only- in-vegas fanfare, the two fighters came out to meet the press. but this first encounter was down, than bedlam. >> i am expecting a good fight and victory. >> you guys came out here to see excitement, that's what both competitors bring to the table. >> brown: also on that table: a mountain of cash. mayweather, the favorite, and pacquiao will split about $300 million. you heard that right: $300 million. pay-per-view t.v. will cost $100, and the very few tickets on sale? >> we have tickets that range up to and over $100,000. $2,700 a piece for some high seating. i want to bring some kleenex

jeffrey brown has our conversation, fresh off the newshour bookshelf. >> brown: the story seems to beginh catastrophe but, in fact, began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. those are first lines of a new memoir byÑi poet elizabeth alexander titled the light of the world. the catastrophe occurred in 2012, the sudden death of her husband of a heart attack just days after his 50th surprise birthday party. >> there's just a strangeness of absence. >> brown: it's so unnatural that he's not coming to dinner. >> unnatural, but someone's things are around, someone's smell is around, someone's garden is coming up that he planted, finding a book and seeing the page marked where he was reading, all of that trace is what i found you know, it takes a while even though, of course, you know, sadly, you know that they're not coming back. >> the love story is the one they shared for 16 years, raising two young boys soloman and simon, now 17 and 15. >> a happy marriage is hard work. so we worked to make our marriage and our family, but did i feel awash with fortune even as we struggled

jeffrey brown talked to her recently at busboys and poets, a bookstore and restaurant in the d.c. area. >> brown: asne seierstad, welcome to you. >> thank you. >> brown: i want to start with a big question because you've written about one troubled individual. you've also looked at a larger society and its changes. was it necessary to do both to see what happened that day? >> oh, definitely. as the title indicates, one of us. maybe the book is also about what made him a terrorist. of course personal and psychological reasons, but could also be political reasons for becoming a terrorist. so it's three stories in the book what made anders brievik go to the island and do what he did. and then the broader picture in norway. >> brown: so you document his troubled childhood, socially awkward obsession with video games, turning to right wing blogs. were you able to get inside his head? >> luckily, i wasn't able to. that's not possible. he had a very well-documented life. early documents from the 1980s. he wrote a diary. i followed ten weeks of the court and i got access to interrogation o

jeffrey brown has our tribute. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> brown: the song: "the thrill is gone." guitar playing: unmistakably belonging to the man who brought the blues to a mass audience, b.b. king. for more than six decades, often averaging more than 300 performances a year, king was one of the most beloved and respected musicians in the world. playing his trademark gibson guitar, which he named "lucille," he created a style and sound all his own. i got a chance to join king on the road, literally on his bus in 2005. >> people think that because you sing the blues, you're boo-hoo- hoo. but all our wives don't leave. we are just like everybody else. we're people, and to me blues is life, has to do with people, places and things. and as long as we live and there are people, we will have blues. ♪ ♪ >> brown: today, praise came in from all over for the man and his music. >> i just wanted to express my sadness and to say thank you to my dear friend bb king. he was a beacon for all of us who love this kind of music, and i thank him from the bottom of my heart. >> brown: he was born '

sonny hosten pamela brown, our senior local analyst, jeffrey toobin and phillip banks.'s your reaction to what's going on chief banks? >> it's very unfortunate, wolf that we had this particular situation. when i say unfortunate, not the fact that you had six police officers who were arrested. if in fact the police officers committed a crime, they should be arrested. but you have another unfortunate incident. >> what does it say, chief banks that three of the six police officers on the dockets listed themselves among their race as black african-american. >> you know that's not surprising to me, wolf, because all of the talks that i've had with people in the community when they have a complaint about how they were being treated, by the police day if there's a a perception of how they were being treated by the police. i never saw in my time with the baltimore police department that there was any kind of race. >> the fact that they it was asian, female it doesn't surprise me at all. people complain about the culture of a system. that's what you're seeing at least the peacef

brown, thanks. >>> joining me to talk about the indictment of the former house speaker, senior legal analyst jeffreygedly lying to the fbi trying to hide hush money he was taking out of the bank but the indictment does not say what the misconduct was although pamela reported it has to do with a former student and alleged sexual misconduct. is this like the feds going an al capone for tax evasion? in other words, this is what they could get him on? >> not necessarily, because investigation of currency transaction reports, that's what those forms that the banks are required to file for large cash transactions that's been going on for decades. i prosecuted that was the kind of case i prosecuted when assistant united states attorney and it's really just a matter of course that banks report to law enforcement when there are suspicions patterns of -- of -- of cash transactions. when there are -- when they are filed and when transactions are structured in a way to avoid those requirements. what happened here it appears is that the fbi was informed ptthe fbi went to hastert and hastert told them what frankl

jeffrey toobin? because he disclosed a lot of information in making this announcement. >> well, this is really the legacy of what we've seen over the past year since michael brown died is it is not simply enough to say trust me i know whether a case should be brought here or not. and i thought he laid out the -- a very compelling case that this was a tragic situation, but it was not a crime. and i think by explaining the facts, by laying out in some detail his view of what happened he gives his office and his decision a lot more credibility. so i hope this becomes a model for prosecutors for how they explain when they make these tough decisions. >> joey jackson, what did you think? >> sure well, speaking of models on the wisconsin law, apparently the investigation itself is not conducted by the police department. wherein the person who was a police officer of that department actually committed or didn't commit a crime. so the investigation is independent pursuant to a law that just went into effect there last year. and so that certainly should give the community some confidence. more importantly, though we will get to know really what this decision was predicated upon

brown spots in just four weeks. it's positively brilliant. aveeno®. naturally beautiful results®. >>> joining us now for the must read opinion pages, director of the earth institute at columbia university, economist dr. jeffreyin washington, associate editor of the "washington post" and msnbc political analyst, eugene robinson. good to have you both on board. >> let's start with the "wall street journal," secret agent sydney, their editorial. >> hillary clinton had the entire state department intelligence division at her disposal. yet she's consuming and taking seriously information from an analyst who knows nothing about the subject. sydney blumenthal's expertise is in political wet work and monetizing his connections in the clintons -- to the clintons. the southern gothic novel that is clinton family political history with its melodrama, betrayals and paranoia has left them dependent on insular loyalists like mr. blumenthals who opinions are never second guessed. voters should know that they will not only be electing hillary and bill and chelsea, but this will entire menagerie. >> a lot of other things to worry about. "wall street journal" doesn't like hillary. i don't much like the libya policy that they