A huge, failed experiment in U.S. farm labor: High schoolers in place of immigrants

In 1965, 20,000 teenagers got to live the life of a farmworker – shoddy housing, cheap food, minimum wage, six-day workweeks, 110-degree heat. "If we took a vote that first day, we would've left," one says. Many others did.

Chris Joyce/NPR The trash you can see is just a tiny fraction of the plastic litter all around you — and likely inside of you They're soil and compost, in oceans and lakes, in drinking water and beer, in fish and shellfish — bits of plastic tinier than one of these letters. They're making their way into the food chain, turning a huge area in the Pacific into "a soup of confetti," and transforming chemically as they break down in ways we don't yet fully grasp. "This happens all the time," says one researcher. "We invent something that seems really great and ... we don't think and we become so dependent on it." NPR Self-driving cars would work great, if it weren’t for all those unpredictable human drivers To teach self-driving cars more about their human counterparts, Dorsa Sadigh is developing a model of human driving behavior. To do that, she puts people into an advanced simulator, then records how they respond when other drivers do idiotic, dangerous things. The hope is to give driving algorithms a better sense of what the nonautomated cars around them might do. Courtesy of the San Diego Union-Tribune ‘We went through something that you can't explain to anyone, unless you were out there in that friggin' heat’ In 1965, after the U.S. ended a program bringing in Mexican laborers to harvest crops, 20,000 teenage boys were recruited from across the country to work on farms in California and Texas. The government effort was endorsed by famous pro athletes and used slogans like "Farm Work Builds Men!" Then the teens saw the conditions they would live and work in for the summer for next to no pay, and the strikes and walkouts started. Sergei Zelensky/IAET SB RAS Neanderthals, Denisovans and us: A Paleolithic ménage à trois Geneticists studying bones from a Siberian cave recently made a startling discovery: A half-Neanderthal, half-Denisovan girl. It's direct evidence — "almost caught in the act, so to say" — of something scientists already had some proof of: that the two hominid species had interbred. We know from our own genomes that both species interbred with our ancestral Homo sapiens, as well. Alex Brandon/AP Trump wants the State Department to look into 'large scale killing of farmers' in South Africa — an idea tied to racist fringe groups South Africa said the tweet was “based on false information,” but organizations that track hate groups says white supremacists play it up as a “white genocide” talking point. The government of South Africa is looking to redistribute some farmland — in some cases without compensation. It is a response to decades of apartheid-era rules that sharply limited African landownership in the country. You received this message because you're subscribed to our Best of NPR emails. |  Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy | NPR 1111 N. CAPITOL ST. NE WASHINGTON DC 20002