May 30, 2017

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Entertainment May 30, 2017

Today In Movie Culture: ‘Wonder Woman’ Trivia, ‘Alien’ as a Comedy and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture.

Movie Trivia of the Day:

In anticipation of the release of Wonder Woman this week, here’s ScreenCrush with a bunch of trivia about the new superhero movie:

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Cosplay of the Day:

We’re going to be seeing a lot of Wonder Woman cosplay this week and beyond, but none will be as adorable as this meeting between one cosplayer and the miniature version (via Fashionably Geek):

#WonderWoman mini-me @MegaConvention#MegaCon2017pic.twitter.com/Qtt9ResRwE

— DisneyLifestylers (@DLifestylers) May 27, 2017

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Custom Prop of the Day:

For AWE Me, the blacksmiths at Baltimore Knife and Sword show how to forge a replica of Wonder Woman’s God Killer sword:

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?Movie Recap of the Day:

The last time (and first time) we saw the new Wonder Woman on the big screen was in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice so to remind us what happened in that here’s a Recap Rap:

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Movie Takedown of the Day:

In honor of the positive reviews of Wonder Woman, here’s a deservedly brutal Honest Trailer for the last female-led DC Comics movie, Catwoman:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Howard Hawks, who was born on this day in 1896, with stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell on the set of His Girl Friday in 1939:

Actor in the Spotlight:

With Baywatch now in theaters, the character actor showcase No Small Parts profiles the career of Alexandra Daddario:

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Movie Score Cover of the Day:

With Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales now in theaters, here’s an a capella performance of the franchise’s theme:

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Reworked Movie of the Day:

With Alien: Covenant in theaters, here’s a reworking of the original Alien so it’s a comedy about a cat from outer space:

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Classic Trailer of the Day;

This week is the 60th anniversary of the release of Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. Watch the original trailer for the classic film below.

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Business May 30, 2017

College Access Index Shows Shrinking Levels Of Economic Diversity

NPR’s Robert Siegel speaks with New York Times columnist David Leonhardt about how this year’s college access index shows that economic diversity is shrinking at American colleges.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

How economically diverse are America’s colleges? That’s a question The New York Times has been asking in an annual survey the paper’s been doing for the past couple of years. The big takeaway this year, according to Times columnist David Leonhardt, is that economic diversity at the nation’s public, four-year colleges is on the decline. And David Leonhardt joins us.

Welcome to the program.

DAVID LEONHARDT: Thank you.

SIEGEL: First, tell us how you measure economic diversity in colleges.

LEONHARDT: There is a scholarship called the Pell Grant. It’s the largest federal scholarship. And colleges have to report how many of their students receive Pell Grants. That means their students come from roughly the bottom 50 percent or bottom 40 percent of the income distribution.

SIEGEL: And what are the colleges that you’re measuring?

LEONHARDT: We restricted this to colleges with a five-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent. And it’s actually depressing how few colleges fit that category – only about 170.

SIEGEL: Public colleges and universities have historically provided a crucial step up in the economic and social scale for young Americans of modest means. How big a decline are you seeing in economic diversity?

LEONHARDT: At some schools, it’s actually fairly shocking. At the University of California in San Diego, the Pell share of the freshmen class fell from 46 percent to 26 percent. And the reason is pretty clear – budget cuts from state governments.

SIEGEL: Meaning that more applicants just can’t attend or the colleges can’t help them pay for it? What is the mechanism there?

LEONHARDT: It’s sort of all of the above. With less money, colleges have less money to enroll lower-income kids. So some of them are going out and recruiting more affluent kids actively. Others are probably not admitting the lower-income kids. But I find this really worrisome because investments in education, historically, have really paid for themselves. And the idea that we’re making it harder for lower and middle-income Americans to go to flagship public universities strikes me as really short-sighted and self-defeating.

SIEGEL: This is the third annual New York Times survey. You’re seeing this trend just over three surveys, or has it been going on longer than that?

LEONHARDT: It’s been going on longer than that. So what happened with public colleges is that when the financial crisis hit in the 2009, 2010 window, a lot of states cut their budgets. They have stopped cutting them, but state support for higher education is still down 18 percent since 2008.

SIEGEL: Now, you’ve written about some increases in the share of students with Pell Grants at several private colleges and universities. And you say that successes don’t necessarily track with the size of a university or a college’s endowment. But despite some exceptions, from what I could see, all of the top 10 Pell Grant enrollments in private colleges are the predictable elite colleges. They were all Ivy’s or Amherst, Williams, elite women’s colleges.

LEONHARDT: Well, there are two different things that go into our ranking. One is the share of kids getting Pell Grants; the other is the cost. And you’re absolutely right. The colleges with the biggest endowments, places like Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, they charge the least for low-income kids, once you take financial aid into account. But when you look at how many Pell students they actually enroll, there’s more variation there. There are schools without huge endowments that are actually doing a better job enrolling poor kids than schools with bigger endowments. Vassar, Franklin and Marshall – these are schools that are not nearly as wealthy and yet they’re actually more economically diverse. And I think they really deserve praise for doing that.

SIEGEL: You’re measuring economic diversity. For years, we were more accustomed to seeing people measure racial, minority diversity. Do you think that such measures would track very closely to the rate of Pell Grants, or might the rate of African-American and Latino students be different from these measures of economic diversity?

LEONHARDT: I do think there would be real differences there. So if you look at the history of higher education, for a long time, these elite institutions excluded women, African-Americans, Latinos, Jews, just huge parts of the population. Starting in the late 1960s, into the ’70s and ’80s, they did much better on that score. The reason we started this is that the data suggests they haven’t done as well making progress on economic diversity as they have on racial diversity. And so while they enroll kids of every religion, every race, every region, often those kids are diverse in every way except economically. And we wanted to capture this other aspect of it.

SIEGEL: David Leonhardt of The New York Times, thanks for talking with us.

LEONHARDT: Thank you.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Sports May 30, 2017

The 'Best Of' Frank Deford, According To Frank Deford

Frank Deford in 1991, holding a dummy copy of the final edition of The National Sports Daily, which he edited and published. It’s hard to distill 37 years of Deford’s sports commentaries down to a few “best of” pieces. But, before he retired, he shared some of his favorites with us.

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Renowned sports writer and commentator Frank Deford, 78, died on Sunday, just a few weeks after his last piece aired on Morning Edition. He had recorded 1,656 commentaries for NPR over nearly 40 years.

Deford left everything on the field when choosing topics for his commentaries. One of his early 1980 pieces argued that losing teams didn’t deserve support, and later that year he opined that the Heisman Trophy was “the second stupidest award given in sports.” In 1992, he told us “television coverage of football is abysmal. It stinks.” A few years later, he weighed in on then-rookie NBA player Jason Williams’ nickname, “White Chocolate.”

But Deford wasn’t always the sports curmudgeon, as Jon Wertheim, executive editor for SportsIllustrated, told Morning Edition.

“I think there was a real versatility to him,” said Wertheim, who knew Deford for more than 20 years. Many sports writers, Wertheim said, got into the business because of Deford.

“He could write with empathy, compassion, and sweetness. He could take stands — as NPR listeners know there were certainly, there were dimensions to sport that bothered him. There was a level of moral outrage,” Wertheim said. “And then he could come back the next week and write about something with real sweetness and tenderness. And he did the same thing in his prose. And he is just an absolute giant in the field.”

For Wertheim, what made Deford’s writing so good, was his reporting and analysis.

“And I think something that gets lost with Frank Deford — you hear what a brilliant writer he was, and all of that is true — but I think his writing in some ways was really shaped by his ability to report, and his ability to analyze. Analyze situations, analyze people, analyze games,” Wertheim said. “And too often we talk about brilliant writers and we lose sight of the fact that they were brilliant reporters as well. Which made the writing easy. And I think Frank is a classic example of that.”

It’s hard to distill 37 years of Deford’s Sweetness and Light commentaries down to a few “best of” pieces. But, before he retired, he shared some of his favorites with us and, here, we share them with you.

Plays, Monet, Faure and football?

Deford came to the defense of Gary Walters, the athletic director at Princeton University, who compared sports to art, in his Oct. 17, 2007, commentary:

What we accepted as great art — whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony — is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

Now, however, that we can study the grace of the athlete on film, a double play can be viewed as pretty as any pas de deux. Or, please: Is not what we saw Michael Jordan do every bit as artistic as what we saw Mikhail Baryshnikov do?

Toss the ball to Shakespeare

There are plays on the field and court, and, well, plays. Deford put the ball in The Bard’s hands for his Jan. 30, 2008, commentary:

Methinks the crunch upon his presence is so great,
And the paparazzi do shine forth such a spangled glare
That the great golden orb above must be dimmed
And the sounds of Niagara itself seem noiseless
Before the din of questions that confront our great Brady.

Hey, you guys!

Deford observed that there was a new “linguistic phenomenon” in his Sept. 27, 2011, commentary — the “guy-ification of America”:

How did females become guys? How did everyone become guys? Remember, too, that a male guy was something of a scoundrel. And a wise guy was a fresh kid, a whippersnapper. In its most other famous evocation, men in Brooklyn said “youse guys.” Damon Runyon referred to hustlers, gamblers and other nefarious types as guys.

Now every mother’s son is a guy and every mother’s daughter, too. If they wrote the musical now, it wouldn’t be called Guys and Dolls –– just Guys and Guys.

Our indecent joy

Deford revisited the topic of concussions and football over and over again, and in his Jan. 16, 2013, commentary he reflected on Americans’ love of the game despite what he called, its “violent nature”:

Football teams represent cities and colleges and schools. The people have built great stadiums, and the game is culturally intertwined with our calendar. We don’t go back to college for the college. We go back for a football game, and, yes, we even call that “homecoming.” It would take some unimagined cataclysmic event to take football from us. Concussions for young men are the price of our love for football, as broken hearts are what we pay for young love.

Put down the ball, pick up a book

In his Sept. 4, 2013, commentary, Deford weighed in on the whistleblower who called attention to fake classes for athletes at UNC-Chapel Hill:

So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren’t educated so much as they are just kept eligible.

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Health May 30, 2017

Are State Rules For Treating Sepsis Really Saving Lives?

A 4-year-old regulation in New York state requires doctors and hospitals to treat sepsis using a protocol that some researchers now question.

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Doctors can save thousands of lives a year if they act promptly to identify sepsis, an often lethal reaction to infection. Sometimes called blood poisoning, sepsis is the leading cause of death in hospitals.

A 4-year-old regulation in New York state compels doctors and hospitals to follow a certain protocol, involving a big dose of antibiotics and intravenous fluids. It’s far from perfect — about a quarter of patients still die from sepsis. But early intervention is helping.

“Intervention has to be quick,” says Dr. Howard Zucker, commissioner of the New York State Health Department.

He knows what happens when it isn’t. In fact, he says, he has a cousin in the hospital right now who has been struggling to recover from a severe bout of sepsis — hospitalized in another state, he adds.

Doctors didn’t immediately realize that he was developing sepsis, and by the time they did, Zucker says it was much more difficult to treat. “That’s what we’re trying to do. We want people to intervene quickly. That’s the regulation, to intervene fast in a situation of this nature.”

Indeed, sepsis death rates in hospitals have declined where these rules are in place.

But Dr. Jeremy Kahn at the University of Pittsburgh has mixed feelings about these regulations.

“If we [doctors] were great at doing the right thing — the thing that most people agree on — then we wouldn’t need regulation,” he says. But in reality, doctors don’t all keep up with the latest best practices and follow them, Kahn says, so regulations save lives.

“The downside is that a regulatory approach lacks flexibility,” he adds. “It essentially is saying we can take a one-size-fits-all approach to treating a complex disease like sepsis.”

That’s problematic, because doctors haven’t found the best way to treat this condition. The scientific evidence is evolving rapidly, Kahn says. “Almost every day another study is released that shows what we thought to be best practice might not be best practice.”

Kahn wrote a commentary about the rapid changes earlier this month for the New England Journal of Medicine.

For a while, medical practice guidelines distributed to doctors called on them to use one particular drug to treat sepsis. It turned out that drug did more harm than good. Another heavily promoted strategy, called goal-directed therapy, also turned out to be ineffective.

And a study presented last week at the American Thoracic Society and published electronically in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that one of the steps required in New York may not be beneficial, either.

The regulations call for a rapid and substantial infusion of intravenous fluids, but that didn’t improve survival in New York state hospitals.

Many doctors consider fluids helpful, but “what we haven’t learned is the specific type of fluid to give patients, how much and how fast of a rate,” says Dr. Christopher Seymour, a critical care researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored the analysis. “It’s been quite controversial.”

“There are consequences and adverse effects that can come from too much fluid,” Seymour says.

In fact, some doctors believe that most patients are better off without this aggressive fluid treatment. There’s a study getting underway to answer that question. Dr. Nathan Shapiro at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center hopes to enlist more than 2,000 patients at about 50 hospitals to answer this life-or-death question.

But that study will take years, and in the meantime doctors have to make a judgment call.

“It is possible that at present they are requiring hospitals to adopt protocols for fluid resuscitation that might not be entirely appropriate,” Kahn says.

There could also be other big changes on the horizon for treating sepsis.

Doctors scattered coast to coast are trying a new protocol that, in addition to limiting fluids, uses high doses of intravenous vitamin C, steroids and vitamin B1. That has generated a great deal of enthusiasm and some startling claims of success, though it remains to be seen whether it is indeed an exciting advance or will become another disappointment in treating sepsis.

Dr. Zucker at the New York Health Department says the current regulations would not stand in the way of advances to treatment.

“If there is a disruptive technology that comes out, or a therapy that comes out, we would adjust accordingly.”

You can reach Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.

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