Every family and every mother knows about it. The push-pull tensions around work and home life just don’t go away — and especially for women.
Last week, a page one New York Times article hit the stands, saying many female students at the elite Yale University plan to shelve their careers and “happily play a traditional [...]

Maybe it’s just a bad case of second term blues, or maybe the deadly storm of Katrina, Majority Leader Tom Delay’s indictment, and the war in Iraq, but Republicans in congress are looking like a headless turkey.
This week, Majority Leader Delay resigned his post after being indicted by a Texas grand jury on conspiracy charges. [...]

In his fabled State of the Union Address in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson set the wheels of government to war on poverty in America. In 1988, President Reagan famously responded that poverty had won that war, and hailed a free market strategy as the solution.
Many Americans simply looked away. Hurricane Katrina made looking away impossible. [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Comedian Brad Stine was nine-years-old when he became a born-again Christian. He was almost forty when his comedy career had its “come to Jesus” moment.
After years in the mainstream business, doing magic routines and “nose floss” jokes, Stine’s career was floundering. After a club gig, he sat with a lesbian comic [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
A grand jury indictment in Travis County, Texas is shaking Washington and the American political world today. For years now, Texas Congressman and GOP strongman Tom DeLay has been THE muscle behind the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill.
If President Bush was the public face, DeLay was - famously - the “hammer” [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Republican Christopher Shays went right at ex-FEMA chief Michael Brown yesterday on Capitol Hill, calling his testimony on the Katrina disaster “clueless,” “feeble,” “shocking” and “beyond belief.” But the blistering critique of Bush administration appointees that has broken out since the hurricane hit has raced far beyond the halls of FEMA.
The charge [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
A superpower takes a lot of things to war. It takes tanks and planes and missiles and soldiers. It also takes - or tries to - its own reality: to believe, to impose.
But the battlefield has a reality, too. America came to Iraq with a vision of what was [...]

Salman Rushdie has been an international figure for a quarter of a century now, since the 1981 publication of his acclaimed “Midnight’s Children.” He’s been a fixture on bookshelves, on Op-Ed pages around the world, and on podiums speaking up, essentially, for freedom.
Rushdie became a household name in 1989 when Iran’s Ayotollah Khomeini issued a [...]

The Catholic Church continues to struggle with the fallout of its staggering sexual abuse scandal. Just yesterday, the Chicago Archdiocese announced it removed 11 priests suspected of sexual misconduct with minors.
Now, under the new leadership of Pope Benedict the 16th, the Vatican is forging a new path, taking a hard look at whether it should [...]

Around the world and in Washington, thousands gathered this weekend to protest the war in Iraq. There were also demonstrations in support of the war effort.
Two key figures from the Vietnam era provide perspective on the impact of this war on the homefront.
Guests:
James Webb, Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, and a Marine [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Young English writer Zadie Smith roared out of Cambridge with her first novel “White Teeth” already in her pocket, and knocked the literary and publishing worlds on their ear with her debut bestseller.
With a voice all her own, sassy, smart as a whip and thrillingly vivid, she painted a world where the [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
In the end, Rita was merciful — but it hardly mattered. The mere threat of another super-storm coming ashore less than a month after Katrina, had millions of Gulf Coast residents on the move — fleeing homes, running out of gas, burning alive.
The machinery of rescue was cranked up, oil rigs and [...]

With Hurricane Rita churning through the Gulf Coast, more than a million residents from Texas and Louisiana have been evacuating. For many, this is the second time that they will have been displaced since Hurricane Katrina hit.
Writer Maggie Heyn Richardson has been reflecting on the plight of the thousands of displaced Louisianians, as they [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Americans have a love-hate affair with television news. They turn it off for being sensationalist McNews McNuggets. They turn it on when disaster strikes. They turn its big figures into big celebrities.
For thirty years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell has moved deeper and deeper into the heart of the TV news [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Economist R. Glenn Hubbard has thrown a long shadow in the White House of George W. Bush and its economic policy. As chairman of the President’s council of economic advisers, he was deep in the tax- cutting fray of the first Bush term, lending his gold- plated academic credentials to the Bush [...]

“Everything is Illuminated,” the movie based on the critically acclaimed and bestselling novel of the same name by American wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer, is in theaters now.
Foer first joined us at On Point back when “Everything is Illuminated” swept the nation in 2002.
In an archive radio diary, we bring you an excerpt of Tom Ashbrook’s [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
For a hundred and fifty years — from the days of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau to the soul-tripping of the ’60s and ’70s — America was a rich, proud hotbed of spiritual seeking.
Within mainstream Christian churches and outside them, the pursuit of spirituality beyond strict religious boundaries was as American as apple [...]

If there was a category six, Rita would be there,” said one meteorolgist tracking the monster storm. Packing 170-plus mile an hour winds, and with Galveston in her sights, Rita is predicted to make landfall on Saturday.
More than a million residents of Texas and Louisiana have already evacuated. Oil companies have shut down refineries, including [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
For almost a month now, the roar of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico has drowned out the roar of battle in Iraq. But the battle noise “over there”, on the other Gulf and into Iraqi towns and desert, has been terrible.
U.S. troops have gone on a raging offensive. Insurgents [...]

Garry Wills, the eminent historian and critic, takes a wide view of history. He has applied his sharp pen to the founding of the American Republic, the contradictions within the Catholic Church, John Wayne and the politics of Celebrity.
In a new book, Wills has turned his attention to the great autobiographer and 19th-century historian Henry [...]

San Diego writer Sue Diaz’s son, Roman, is about to head back to Iraq for a second 15-month tour of duty. Three years ago, he was a specialist in the Army’s First Armored Division. Now, he’s got his own unit to command.
In this radio diary, Sue Diaz tells us about how rank [...]

San Diego writer Sue Diaz’s son, Roman, is about to head back to Iraq for a second 15-month tour of duty. Three years ago, he joined the Army’s First Armored Division as a private. Now, he’s got his own unit to command.
In this radio diary, Sue Diaz tells us about how rank isn’t [...]

If there’s one lesson Americans have learned in the last few years, it’s that big disasters — man-made like 9/11 or natural disasters like Katrina can happen here. Now Hurricane Rita is a Category Four rumbling through the Gulf of Mexico.
Last week, President Bush took responsibility for the government’s failure in response to Katrina and [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Simon Wiesenthal, the greatest Nazi-hunter of the 20th century, died last night, in his sleep, in Vienna. He was 96, and a survivor of twelve Nazi death camps during World War II. Eighty-nine of Simon Wiesenthal’s relatives were among the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust.
In the decades [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to oil and Americans, that hideous price at the gas pump is just the beginning of big, scary issues these days. Next in line will be the winter heating bill — sure to be punishing this year.
But the really big monsters coming out of the closet are 1) [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
We were all primates once, science tells us. And the proof might seem immediately clear looking around the average office. The ape in the corner office is just the beginning, says, longtime nature writer Richard Conniff.
Watch how we gossip, he says, how we kowtow and roar, how we make nice [...]

This morning, North Korea agreed to stop building nuclear weapons and allow international inspections in exhange for energy aid, economic cooperation, and security assurances. The annoucement came at the close of six-party talks in Beijing.
Gordon Fairclough, correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, explains what really has been agreed to by North Korea.
Guests:
Gordon Fairclough, correspondent [...]

It was Election Day in the mountains and deserts and of Afghanistan yesterday. Despite pre-election violence and Taliban threats to disrupt the vote, millions of Afghans turned out to vote for thousands of candidates — who included many women — to a national parliament and provincial councils.
Officially, the balloting marked the last formal step [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
From the moment George Bush got to Ground Zero after September 11, threw his arm around a fireman and grabbed a bullhorn, the president who had squeaked to victory by a Supreme Court ruling found his theme: leadership. Love him or hate him, for a long stretch that followed, Americans overwhelmingly [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
“We will build it higher, and better.” With those words, George Bush last night pointed to a rebuilt Gulf Coast. “One of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen,” pledged the president, standing alone in New Orleans’ French Quarter, against the floodlit facade of a great cathedral in Jackson Square.
And [...]

President Bush will address the nation tonight from New Orleans in which he is expected to call for an unprecedented federal commitment to help rebuild the Gulf Coast.
The $200-billion-dollar figure that is being floated would be more than has been spent on the Iraq war, and it would be the largest reconstruction effort ever on [...]

The rows of bodies in the hospitals and nursing homes and the wreckage in the Superdome tell us most of what we need to know about the failed relief effort in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Almost three weeks later, Americans have reached into their own pockets to donate a wave of relief charity unprecedented [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight of frontier Pakistan, someone’s thinking of Americans and George W. Bush and the troops in Iraq. Four years after 9/11 and Bush’s unfulfilled “dead or alive” promise, Osama Bin Laden is uncaptured and, as far as we know, alive, well and watching.
According to journalist Mark [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
If there’s a giant of American literature who spans the muddy waters of Katrina and the bloody mess of Iraq, it has to be Mark Twain.
The tribal chief of American letters, Twain cut his teeth on Mississippi riverboats churning to New Orleans, and cut to the quick of his nation’s character in [...]

Two Chinese students living in exile in the United States have filed a lawsuit against Chinese President Hu Jintao. Wang Dan was a student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Wang Juntao was labeled “The Black Hand” behind the student movement.
Both served jail terms and were exiled to the United States, only after international [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
In Beijing, the buzz phrase for China’s ascent to global power is “peaceful rising.” That is the nearly-official Chinese depiction of what the ancient nation is up to in its very modern surge to power — peace and prosperity, for China and the world.
In Washington, some China watchers are not so [...]

Two weeks ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gave a stark warning that housing and stock prices could tumble. That’s just one more thing for the small investor to worry about.
Yale University’s chief investment officer David Swensen is at the top of his class. He manages Yale’s $15 billion endowment, which has grown an average [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
“I’m just a humble umpire, ready to call balls and strikes. No agenda. Just your servant. The servant of the nation.” That was the message yesterday from Judge John Roberts before eighteen U.S. senators in a hearing room on Capitol Hill.
But Roberts could be an umpire whose calls could [...]

22-year old soldier Luke Stricklin spent a year in Iraq. For months, friends and family of the Arkansas National Guardsman asked what it was like, and wanted him to share his feelings about the war. He couldn’t. Conversations over a static-filled phone line weren’t enough.
So, he paid a young Iraqi boy $25 dollars [...]

The last time she was in the job market, activist and essayist Barbara Ehrenreich worked as a WalMart clerk, a janitor, and a low-wage food server. Based on that experience, she wrote “Nickel and Dimed,” about the travails of low-wage America.
This time out, Ehrenreich has put herself in the middle-class, white-collar hot seat, spending almost [...]

Confirmation hearings begin today for John Roberts, President Bush’s pick to succeed William Rehnquist as chief justice
Guests:
Charles Babington, covering the John Roberts’ hearings for The Washington Post

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been a rough summer for U.S. President George W. Bush. First, Cindy Sheehan - the grieving mother of a dead soldier in Iraq - turned his Crawford vacation into a focal point for national recrimination on the mess of the war.
Then oil and gas prices headed over the moon. Then Katrina [...]

Around the country Americans are opening their hearts and their wallets and doing whatever they can to help those in need after Hurricane Katrina. Among those reaching out are families of those who died on 9/11.
Even as they prepare to mark the fourth anniversary of their loss, they are mobilizing to help those devastated by [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
It will be four years this Sunday since 9/11/2001. It was an epic smack to the face of the United States. Novelist Tom Wolfe was watching. So was national security chieftain and mega-thinker Zbignev Brezinski. And they’ve been watching the world, and us, ever since.
Tom Wolfe and Zbignev Brezinski will help [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
For the past two weeks, the city of New Orleans has been turned by catastrophe into a roaring national and global news story.
But at bottom, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the trials that have followed are being lived in intensely personal stories — of families and dreams dashed, of hope and [...]

Guests: