Episodes
Tuesday Sep 28, 2010
In Praise of Adoption
Tuesday Sep 28, 2010
Tuesday Sep 28, 2010
The subject of adoption has, for too long, been something we've had trouble talking about. While the rate of adoption has been declining here, the acceptance of family diversity has been on the rise. International adoptions are transforming American families, and yet special challenges abound. NPR's Scott Simon has written a powerful new book on the subject of adoptions. Part memoir, part love story, part public policy treatise, Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption is a gift to the 1.5 million adoped childen in the U.S. whose bond with their adopted parents is ever bit as powerful as those with birth parents. My conversation with Scott Simon:
Monday Sep 27, 2010
The Christian Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
Monday Sep 27, 2010
Monday Sep 27, 2010
Friday Sep 24, 2010
Money and the decline of America's global leadership
Friday Sep 24, 2010
Friday Sep 24, 2010
Clearly America's role in the world is changing. The American Century, declared by Henry Luce, seventy years ago, may have long since reached its apex. Many view this as a positive sign of humility and a refreshing lack of nationalistic hubris. We also hear much about our growing national debt, caused in large measure by the military expansionism of the past 9 years. Remember, Bill Clinton left us with a surplus back in 2000. The question now is how are these two ideas related. How is American foreign policy and our role in the world, being shaped or influenced by our economic limitations and is that a good or a bad development? In his latest work, The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, Professor Michael Mandelbaum, one of our most astute foreign policy thinkers, takes on these dual questions and what they mean for the future of global leadership. My conversation with Michael Mandelbaum:
Wednesday Sep 22, 2010
America's Great Migration
Wednesday Sep 22, 2010
Wednesday Sep 22, 2010
Every so often a books comes along that reminds us of why narrative history matters. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson has given us such a book in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She gives us a deeply personal tale of one of the great underreported stories of the 20th century: the migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North, West and Midwest. To understand this story is to finally come to grips with race, power, politics, religion and class in our contemporary society. My conversation with Isabel Wilkerson:
Tuesday Sep 21, 2010
Somebody Else's Century
Tuesday Sep 21, 2010
Tuesday Sep 21, 2010
T.S. Eliot wrote that "we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began...and know that place again for the first time." And so it is that in this new century as we are compelled to interact more with the East, with China, with Japan and with India, perhaps it will better enable us to understand our own limitations and see ourselves in a global rather than a provincial context. In so doing, we might also redefine both the importance of history, coupled with our ongoing urge to be modern. Author and journalist Patrick Smith in his new work Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World, delves with extraordinary depth, into what it means to maintain ones true and unique identity and culture, amidst the onslaught of Western modernity. My conversation with Patrick Smith:
Monday Sep 20, 2010
Share and Share Alike
Monday Sep 20, 2010
Monday Sep 20, 2010
Saturday Sep 18, 2010
Designer Genes
Saturday Sep 18, 2010
Saturday Sep 18, 2010
Last week, on the program, we talked about the ability to sequence your own genome and what that might mean for the future understanding of our own health. Now we are going to look further into the future, at how cutting edge genetic science may literally allow us to speed up and transform our own evolution. In a matter of just a few years we may be able to improve ourselves and our children, duplicate ourselves, improve our genes, in short, to personally guide our genetic destiny. However this does not come without serious ethical, moral and cultural choices. What was once the realm of science fiction, now must be a real part of our national debate. Dr. Steven Potter, in his new book Designer Genes: A New Era in the Evolution of Man takes us to the outer limits of that debate and what might soon be possible. My conversation with Steven Potter:
Wednesday Sep 15, 2010
Your own genome for $1000
Wednesday Sep 15, 2010
Wednesday Sep 15, 2010
Friday Sep 10, 2010
Why is there something?
Friday Sep 10, 2010
Friday Sep 10, 2010
It's one of the most fundamental, yet controversial questions of our time, or of any time. How did the universe begin? Where did the universe come from and what are the laws of nature that govern the universe? The worlds most esteemed physicist, Stephen Hawking once said that "if we understood all the forces that created the universe, we'd understand the mind of God." Now Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow have changed that view. They believe that the universe could indeed have created itself from nothing and that surely means that perhaps other universes were formed before the Big Bang and that others still exist. All of this mind bending physics is the essence of a new book by Mlodinow and Hawking, The Grand Design. My conversation with Leonard Mlodinow:
Tuesday Sep 07, 2010
Why Margaret Thatcher matters
Tuesday Sep 07, 2010
Tuesday Sep 07, 2010
Thursday Sep 02, 2010
The truth, the whole truth and nothng but....
Thursday Sep 02, 2010
Thursday Sep 02, 2010