Talk of the Nation

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, begins at sundown next Tuesday. It's one of the holiest days of the year and marks a time for reflection and repentance. People of many faith backgrounds, and also those who are not especially religious, think about atonement, what it takes to achieve it, and how it affects their lives.

The strike in Chicago, the nation's third-largest school district, raises questions about teachers unions nationwide. Jane Hannaway, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, and Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education, explain how different teachers unions work.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Forty-seven percent, the Palestinians have no interest in peace, and it would be easier to get elected president as a Latino. It's Wednesday and time for a...

MITT ROMNEY: Not elegantly stated...

CONAN: Edition of the political junkie.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: There you go again.

VICE PRESIDENT WALTER MONDALE: When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?

SENATOR BARRY GOLDWATER: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

Mother Jones released the full video of Mitt Romney at a Florida fundraising event in May that included the clips they made public of Mitt Romney commenting on the "47 percent." NPR senior Washington editor Ron Elving talks about the tape and how it could affect the presidential campaign.

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NEAL CONAN, HOST:

It's Tuesday and time to read from your comments.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. The NIH superbug claimed its seventh victim last week, more than six months after specialists at one of the country's most prestigious hospitals thought they had the outbreak contained. The bug is called Klebsiella - I'll get it right - Klebsiella pneumoniae, or KPC for short, and most antibiotics can't kill it. It's one of several drug-resistant bacteria that many hospitals struggle to control. The best known is probably MRSA.

Demand for Apple's iPhone 5 is expected to be so big that one economist predicted sales could boost the U.S. economy 1/2 percent. And Apple's going to court to shut down what it sees as copycats. Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo talks about who's competing with Apple, and whether it's working.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Anybody who watches police procedurals on TV knows the term AFIS. That stands for the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. And over the next couple of years, it's being updated, and we're going to have to get used to a new acronym, NGIS, the Next-Generation Identification System, which incorporates an improved fingerprint system and all kinds of other biometric data, from face recognition to iris scans.

Several colleges and universities have adopted a common read program, in which first year students read the same book during the summer, then discuss it when they get to campus.

NPR'S Neal Conan talks with Brooke Gladstone, co-host of On The Media, about her book, The Influencing Machine, a graphic novel that tries to decipher the rapidly changing media business and the ways people interact with it.

Interview Highlights

On why her book works as a freshman read