Please Explain from WNYC New York Public Radio

Grammy-winning bandleader?Vince Giordano?and trumpeter, vocalist, and composer?Bria Skonberg?teach us about?swing music!?They will both be appearing in Town Hall's second annual winter variety show, featuring modern takes on classic holiday songs from the early twentieth century alongside exciting collaborations in the fields of dance, storytelling and comedy.?

?Ballet originated in the Renaissance and was embraced by?France's Louis XIV, who danced leading roles,?designed costumes and wrote librettos. Ballet wound its way from Paris to Milan and Vienna, St. Petersburg, eventually landing in the United States.?Jennifer Homans, a?former dancer and?Director of the?Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and?Kevin McKenzie,?former principal dancer and currently Artistic Director with?the American Ballet Theatre, will be on the show to discuss the history of this often-misunderstood art form. ?

Sara Seager, Planetary Science and Physics Professor?at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research, tell us all about how astronomers look for extraterrestrial life and other planets like earth in the universe.?

On November 10, President Obama posted a video and statement on the White House website, urging the FCC to protect Net Neutrality,?which ensuring all internet traffic is treated equally??for everyone. The President stated that losing Net Neutrality?could mean losing the internet as we know it. He asked the FCC to reclassify the internet?a part of the communications law known as?Title II, but FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is not sold on the idea.?On this week's Please Explain, we?discuss Net Neutrality, and how it affects everyone who uses the internet.?Marvin Ammori is a lawyer who is best known for his work opposing SOPA and defending network neutrality.?He is a 2014 Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation,?has represented several companies and coalitions including Google, Dropbox, eBay, Automattic, Tumblr, Twitter, and others. He recently authored the book On Internet Freedom.?Michal Rosenn?is Deputy General Counsel at Kickstarter, the leading funding platform for creative projects. She has served in that role since October 2012, advising the start-up on intellectual property, contractual, employment, corporate governance, and regulatory matters, among others.

Kaci Hickox, the Ebola health worker who was the first person forcibly quarantined under New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's controversial health order, was released on Monday, October 27. She returned home to Maine, and said that she would defy the the voluntary quarantine policy in Maine. Maine's Governor, Paul R. LePage, issued a statement Wednesday saying that his office is seeking "legal authority to enforce the quarantine" on Hickox. As states and the federal government conflict over how to regulate, police, and enforce quarantines, citizens get caught up in the middle.On this week's Please Explain, we are talking about the history of and medical and legal guidelines for quarantines.We're joined by Howard Markel, George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. Dr. Markel is the author, co-author, or co-editor of ten books including the award winning Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 and When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed.

For this week's Please Explain, Hanna Rosin discusses teen sexting, the pervasive trend of teenagers who send and spread, naked pictures of themselves and their peers on their cell phones. She's joined by Marsha Levick, Deputy Director and Chief Counsel of the Juvenile Law Center. For her article "Why Teens Sext," Rosin, a senior editor at The Atlantic?and a founder and editor at?DoubleX, Slate's women's section, spent several weeks in Louisa County, VA, where hundreds of students were caught up in a sexting scandal. She looks at how students, teachers, and law enforcement perceive sexting, why parents and law enforcement are unaware of? how pervasive it is, and what should be done to deal with it. Some legislatures are creating laws specific to teen sexting, but in many states, possessing these pictures (even if they are your own) fall under child pornography laws and can lead to teens being labeled as sex offenders.

This week's Please Explain is all about the language of food. Dan Jurafsky, professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University, investigates why we eat toast at breakfast and raise a toast at dinner, whether Thanksgiving turkey has anything to do with the country of Turkey, and examines the many words used to describe foods. He's the author of The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.

Decades ago, as agriculture became centralized, seeds were selected for?yield, and many varieties nearly went extinct. Now, a few?intrepid?farmers,?entrepreneurs, and chefs and bringing back these heirloom?seeds. On this week's Please Explain, we're joined by:?Dan Barber?is the Chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located within Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture; and?Glenn Roberts,?founder of Anson Mills,?which grows, harvests, and mills near-extinct varieties of heirloom corn, rice, and wheat organically. Anson Mills now works with 30 organic growers in six states to grow a variety of native heirloom grains.

Pete Wells, New York Times restaurant critic, and Sam Sifton, the New York Times?food editor and former restaurant reviewer, explain the art of reviewing restaurants for this week's Please Explain. They'll?discuss what critics look for, what they order, how they judge the food, as well as?the way the New York dining landscape has changed, the influence of reviews on the success and failure of a restaurant. They'll also explain how restaurant reviewing?has changed in the age of Yelp?and share?stories from the best and worst places where they've eaten.?

Acoustical engineer Trevor Cox, author of The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World, discusses acoustics, how sound works, and his hunt for the world's strangest sounds.Leave your questions as a comment, below, or call us at 212-433-9692.

The Weather Channel's four-day pollen forecast for New York notes that grass pollen is high, tree pollen is moderate. For the many who people suffer from seasonal allergies, spring brings sneezing and sniffling. So on this week's Please Explain, Dr.?Clifford Bassett, Medical Director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, tells us why and what we can do to find relief:Climate change has led to worse allergies because the pollen seasons have been starting earlier in the spring and lasting about four weeks longer in the fall.Allergies and asthma have been increasing around the world.Male plants produce more pollen, and in NYC there are more male trees than female trees in recent years, so allergies here have been getting worse.Ragweed produces about 1 billion pollen spores. ??If you have dark circles under your eyes, it may be due to a sinus problem caused by allergies. Dr. Bassett referred to "allergic shiners" — puffiness and purple circles around the eyes.Allergies interfere with sleep, because if you can't breathe well, you can't sleep well.Allergies can make people miserable. They can make it hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, hard to exercise, but they are treatable and something we can control. "Poorly controlled allergies have a negative impact on your love life," said Dr. Bassett. "And that's no joke."Diagnosing allergies often involves a skin prick test, where a very small amount of an allergen is pricked into the skin. If the skin becomes red, itchy and swollen, it indicates an allergy. Blood tests can also diagnose allergies.Immunotherapy drops or injections make you more tolerant to an allergen over time. This treatment is designed to decrease and stop allergies.Some people swear by eating local honey every day as a way to decrease seasonal allergies. Like immunotherapy, it's thought to expose people to small amounts of pollen in the area. It's not a proven treatment, though.Rinsing the sinuses with a neti pot can also help some people, but, Dr. Bassett said, if home remedies and over-the-counter medication isn't providing relief, see an allergist.

The Weather Channel's four-day pollen forecast for New York notes that grass pollen is high, tree pollen is moderate. For the many who people suffer from seasonal allergies, spring brings sneezing and sniffling. So on this week's Please Explain, Dr.?Clifford Bassett, Medical Director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, tells us why and what we can do to find relief:Climate change has led to worse allergies because the pollen seasons have been starting earlier in the spring and lasting about four weeks longer in the fall.Allergies and asthma have been increasing around the world.Male plants produce more pollen, and in NYC there are more male trees than female trees in recent years, so allergies here have been getting worse.Ragweed produces about 1 billion pollen spores. ??If you have dark circles under your eyes, it may be due to a sinus problem caused by allergies. Dr. Bassett referred to "allergic shiners" — puffiness and purple circles around the eyes.Allergies interfere with sleep, because if you can't breathe well, you can't sleep well.Allergies can make people miserable. They can make it hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, hard to exercise, but they are treatable and something we can control. "Poorly controlled allergies have a negative impact on your love life," said Dr. Bassett. "And that's no joke."Diagnosing allergies often involves a skin prick test, where a very small amount of an allergen is pricked into the skin. If the skin becomes red, itchy and swollen, it indicates an allergy. Blood tests can also diagnose allergies.Immunotherapy drops or injections make you more tolerant to an allergen over time. This treatment is designed to decrease and stop allergies.Some people swear by eating local honey every day as a way to decrease seasonal allergies. Like immunotherapy, it's thought to expose people to small amounts of pollen in the area. It's not a proven treatment, though.Rinsing the sinuses with a neti pot can also help some people, but, Dr. Bassett said, if home remedies and over-the-counter medication isn't providing relief, see an allergist.

The Weather Channel's four-day pollen forecast for New York notes that grass pollen is high, tree pollen is moderate. For the many people suffer from seasonal allergies, spring brings sneezing and sniffling, so on this week's Please Explain, Dr. Clifford Bassett, Medical Director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, tells us why and what we can do to find relief.??

On this week's Please Explain we'll find out how the human eye works and how it enables us to see the world around us. Dr. George A. Cioffi, Chairman and Ophthalmologist-in-Chief of the Department of Ophthalmology at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, tells us how to keep our eyes healthy; why our vision changes; and how problems like glaucoma, cataracts, and macular degeneration affect our vision.

Dr. Matthew Ebben of Weill Cornell Medical College's Center for Sleep Medicine discusses what normal sleep is and what happens when it gets disrupted by disorders such as insomnia, snoring, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, sleep walking, and narcolepsy. He explains the causes and treatments for sleep problems. Dr. Ebben is Assistant Professor of Psychology in Clinical Neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College.