Researchers have been asking a basic question of young people. Should men be allowed to beat their wives? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. U.N. researchers put that question to adolescent girls in India and Pakistan and 53 percent - a majority of girls - said yes, wife beating is justifiable even if it's for refusing sex.
Steve InskeepYounger people - not just older people - holding this basic underlying attitude that's suggested there that women aren't worth much, that they're property, that just about anything can be done with them.
Steve InskeepThe president-elect seems to want Russia as a friend. President Obama arguably has not wanted to say that Russia is that great of a threat.
Steve InskeepThe fact that - I mean, these are things to be talked about. You can't do anything without educating the public, right? And that's a slow work.
Steve InskeepPeople don't know where they stand and what they're going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here, to American cities, which, in the '80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence.
Steve InskeepLet me name three of the people who influenced me, although it's definitely not a complete list. Ayesha Jalal, the formidable Pakistani-American historian, has rigorously re-evaluated Jinnah's political strategies leading up to Partition. Akbar Ahmed, a former diplomat and now a distinguished scholar, has documented Jinnah's life as a man who welcomed, worked with, and even married people of other faiths. And then there is Ardeshir Cowasjee, the great Parsi newspaper columnist, who in his mid-80s is a kind of living history of all of Pakistan, old enough to have known Jinnah himself.
Steve Inskeep