The State We're In, 17 March 2012. A documentary filmmaker from Congo helps convict a warlord of war crimes; a young woman from Baghdad fights for a new Iraq on the basketball court; a woman in Cairo copes with sexual harassment on the street, in cars, even on horseback; and a faithful couple suspects each other of cheating.
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Safa Al-Sultani lost both her father and brother in the Iraq War. She’s now putting the pieces of her life back together... on the basketball court.
Safa plays for the American University in Sulaymaniyah.
She’s also the team manager and tells host Jonathan Groubert how playing an American sport has deepened her understanding of her own country. View photos.
Salaam Dunk is an award-winning documentary, directed by David Fine.
Bukeni Waruzi is a documentary filmmaker from Congo whose work centres on child soldiers.
He was at the International Court in The Hague when the verdict was announced.
Former warlord Thomas Lubanga Diyalo was convicted of all three counts of war crimes.
He tells Jonathan why he never thought this day would come.
Watch Bukeni Waruzi's A Duty to Protect.
Sarah Wali left Egypt largely because of the sexual harassment she experienced.
But when the Mubarak regime was toppled, she decided to return.
Only to find that the harassment was as bad as ever: on the street, in the car, even on horseback.
Read a transcript of Sarah's essay.
Monogamy rocks - listen in new player
Well, Steve Zarpas in Norfolk, Virginia told us that he’s remained happily faithful through 19 years of marriage, despite lots of chances to cheat undetected.
But then, as Steve read some fiction his wife had been writing, he became convinced that she was cheating.
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I would simply like to make two points. So called open-relationships are toxic to all committed couples, gay or straight. If you have to do is ask your children what they think. Case closed. The main point that infuriated me about The Monogamy Gap was the ridiculous rationale of choosing 120 college athletes to measure the capacity of male monogamy. Why not survey five-year olds to see if people like boiled spinach? He then had the nerve to call the survey valid outside of the highly specific control group. Gimme a friggin break. Monogamy Rocks!
I enjoy your program, but I was bemused by the last segment of today's show (Deal With It), in which a man describes his happily monogamous existence, complete with passionate sex life with his gorgeous wife, following an adolescence of sexual excess and cheating. And this guy criticizes your earlier guest who argued, based on actual evidence, that our fixation on monogamy is damaging families. I didn't hear you challenge him that his experience might not be representative or, more importantly, that the singular of "data" is not "anecdote." I'm happy for him, but does he think he's typical? Doesn't he recognize that his youthful escapades actually strengthen the case against monogamy? It was a moderately entertaining segment, but you both seemed clueless. One man's experience - even the experience of a hundred men - don't stand up to the studies on infidelity. You are very skilled at evoking thrilling, chilling, sad, and funny stories from people, but at least in this episode you seem to dismiss science for the sake of a story. I feel passionately that non-scientists need to understand science better and should not be encouraged (however unintentionally) to dismiss a data-based evaluation on the evidence of one man's experience. Your audience deserves better. I hope that, if you can't handle science-based stories better than this, you will just stop using them. You'll still have a great program (better than today's, too).
Ken, your assumptions are so broad that I don't even know where to start in this direct rebuttal. For starters, I am exceptionally grounded in the natural sciences and keenly aware of appropriate protocols for statistical analysis. It is often stated that Physical Chemistry is the most difficult undergrad course in college. Differential calculus is used to mine statistically significant data from a field of incoherent static. I crushed P-Chem and loved it.
It was Eric's absolute dismissal of the most basic tenets of statistical analysis that initially got me so angry. The attempt to support his assertion that men are biologically incapable of monogamy by surveying a group of college athletes was patently absurd from the outset. Any rational adult would laugh out loud when presented with that "evidence".
Again, why not survey alcoholics about their ability to have just one drink? Or five-year olds about the ability to eat squid?
Eric Anderson's next fatal "scientific" mistake was to compare human beings to mammals. As I stated in the interview, human beings have a pre-frontal cortex which accounts for 41% of the weight of the brain. The next closest mammal, the gibbon, has a mere 7%, then dogs at 5%. The specious argument comparing humans to animals dismisses centuries of empirical data regarding the human capacity for discernment.
I would be happy to go on with a short introduction to human neuro-processing vis-a-vis mammals if I didn't think it would bore everybody else. A more cogent question might be to ask "Who funded Mr. Anderson's research?"
Could it be there was an agenda, a preconceived notion, a false assertion that could only be supported by false science? I would say the statistical likelihood is >50%.
Hi Ken, and thanks for contacting us. Steve has obviously responded already, but I just wanted to let you know that the aim of the piece with him and Cindi was not to counter claims made by Eric Anderson, but to start with his response to that interview and let his/their story unfold from there. Perhaps we didn't make the purpose of this story clear enough. We weren't dismissing science; we just had that conversation a few weeks prior.
P.S. I listen to your show on WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana.
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