By host Tom Ashbrook:
The ticking stopwatch still comes ever Sunday night, and right behind it, the familiar voice announcing: “I’m Mike Wallace.” For thirty-seven years, CBS newsman Mike Wallace has interviewed the great and the grand, con men and killers for “60 Minutes.” And that’s just his best-known job in a long broadcasting career.
He’s taken [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
With his poll numbers down, again, to all-time lows, President Bush is standing up today with a big speech promising to outline a “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” Not an “exit strategy,” but a victory strategy, Don Rumsfeld said yesterday — a strategy for Iraqis, but also for Americans who, in [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
E.O. Wilson is as big a biologist as the world has to offer, arguably the planet’s most honored scholar of life. He is a towering figure in the science of insects, animal behavior, evolutionary psychology, environmental ethics, and the philosophy of knowledge itself. He’s been called one of the greatest thinkers of the [...]

by Tom Ashbrook
There was more bad news for the GOP and the country on the corruption front yesterday. Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham of California pled guilty to charges of taking $2.4 million dollars in bribes to help rig defense contracts — cash, antiques, vacations, a yacht, his daughter’s graduation party — all on the take.
But [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Iraq is a trap,” wrote the legendary Arabist T.E. Lawrence. “The people were tricked into going there.” “We are not far from disaster.” “It will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.”
Suddenly, in 2005, everyone is quoting Lawrence of Arabia from 1920. American soldiers and generals are reading his “Seven Pillars [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Today in Montreal, Canada, ten thousand environmentalists and officials have gathered to look beyond the years and framework of the Kyoto Protocol, at the future of the world’s increasingly urgent struggle with global warming. Thousands of miles to the south, one clue may lie in plans for the sunny Mojave Desert.
After [...]

For the last ten years, Andly Kindler has delivered on a ruthless campaign against what he calls “hack” comedy — comedy that isn’t funny.
Once each year, after poring over the year’s sitcoms, movie comedies, and stand-up shows, Kindler delivers his “State of The Industry Speech.”
It happens at the Montreal “Just for Laughs” comedy festival, and [...]

A new organic movement is taking hold of the country’s death industry, as baby boomers push to reinvent what will define them in death. The so-called “green burials” or “eco-burials” combine simplicity with environmental conservation.
Instead of being buried in cemeteries with manicured lawns and granite headstones, a growing number of Americans would rather be buried [...]

At one time taking a photograph had an air of mystery — of not knowing quite what would come out until the roll of film went to the developers, and within an hour or a few days, the pictures of a summer vacation, a birthday party, a wedding would be produced. The rise of [...]

In the not so distant past, etiquette classes were the domain of the ultra-rich who needed to perfect their country club manners. These days, 20 and 30-something ordinary Jills and Joes are signing up for etiquette classes. Books about etiquette are flying off the shelves and adult education classes are booked to the hilt.
What this [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s a strange homage paid to the turkey on millions of American tables tomorrow. The great bird will be praised, stuffed, and eaten. But the universe of human interaction with the feathered world — with birds — is a vast one, deeply rooted in myth and fable, literature and worship.
For [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On August 29th, the wind and rains came, the sea surged, the levees failed, and a great American city was lost to the hurricane. Two wild and troubled weeks later, George Bush stood in the French Quarter’s Jackson Square and promised to “do what it takes… stay as long as it [...]

Historian Douglas Brinkley is among the thousands of Katrina evacuees who will spend Thanksgiving away from their homes in New Orleans.
In this radio diary, he reflects on what he has learned about the human spirit since Katrina and what it means to give thanks in the wake of tragedy.
Guests:
Douglas Brinkley, professor of history and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When he came out in 1996 with the bestseller “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt quickly became an international celebrity. He was 66-years-old, a lifelong teacher with a beguiling story of childhood in Ireland and a killer brogue straight out of Limerick. Or, in his own typically self-skewering words, the “mick of the moment,” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon was not nicknamed “the bulldozer” for nothing. In a long, bold controversial military and political life, Sharon has led commandos, stormed across the Suez Canal, been implicated in massacre and provided the spark for Palestinian intifada.
At the heart of the conservative Likud Party, he championed the [...]

Innovation has long been the high octane fuel driving the American engine to prosperity — the creative force that delivered the microchip, the airbag, and email. Now, that American cutting edge of invention is being dulled.
Tinkerers and corporations alike are working in an environment increasingly hostile to the whizz-bang act of creation. China [...]

When Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha said last week that it was time to bring the troops home from Iraq, it touched off a bitter debate in Washington.
Republicans and Democrats in the House shouted and traded insults in a heated exchange that culminated in a late-night vote against summary troop withdrawal. The high emotion [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
For years the stage show “Latinologues” has provided audiences across the country with a series of comic monologues about the Latino experience in America.
Its characters include Buford Gomez, the slightly unhinged and over-aggressive U.S. border patrol agent; Miss Puerto Rico, who’ll do just about anything to hold on to her beauty [...]

Carol Lees learned she had Gaucher disease when still a teenager. The disease enlarges the spleen and liver and weakens the bones. Its victims worldwide are fewer than 10,000. It can cause tremendous discomfort, and without treatment, is fatal.
Until 1991, there was no treatment for the disease. When Lees first heard of a new drug, [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
As health care costs continue to rise and employer-based insurance coverage continues to shrink, more and more Americans are living without health insurance. It’s a problem that afflicts the working poor and a growing share of the middle class.
Now a number of states — from California to Illinois to Connecticut [...]

The plot thickens for United States Senator Barbara Boxer. The California Democrat has written a novel about a fictional ultra-conservative Supreme Court nominee who must be stopped in Washington.
Truth is stranger than any fiction. Right now, a battle royale is being fought over the direction of the Supreme Court and future of abortion rights. Boxer [...]

“Realism” in foreign policy is defined as a doctrine in which America is guided exclusively by strategic self-interest. Moral considerations are secondary at best. With constant reports of prisoner abuse and mounting casualties in Iraq, foreign policy realism may be in for a comeback.
Promoting democracy may be laudable in Iraq and elsewhere, but critics [...]

The Japanese Imperial family celebrated a noteworthy modernizing event yesterday: Princess Sayako, the Emperor’s daughter, broke from tradition and married a commoner. In doing so, she has relinquished her status as a member of the imperial family — a family which has faced increasing pressure to produce a male heir to the throne.
Hear a conversation [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist and social documentarian Po Bronson grew up - like millions of American kids - with divorced parents in what he calls a dysfunctional family.
He thought he’d never marry. He tried once and divorced. He thought he’d never have children. He wrote bestsellers out of California and put family out [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Now it’s official: the FDA decision to keep “Plan B,” the so-called “morning after pill,” out of over-the-counter sales, was a doozy in the vein of politics trumping science.
A General Accounting Office (GAO) report, out this week, finds that the Bush’s Food and Drug Administration appointees ditched normal procedure and agency [...]

Here’s a pop quiz: What’s the hottest issue on the minds of Republican voters these days? Abortion? Social Security? War? The Supreme Court? No, according to a poll this summer, it’s illegal immigration. One Republican congressman calls immigration the “highest octane issue in America.”
Some 11 million undocumented foreigners are [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the split-screen reality of our globalized world: President Bush on his way to Beijing, celebrating open markets and free trade. And American auto worker Chris Brown, 47-years-old, with a family outside Detroit, looking at his 26-dollar-an-hour factory wage being slashed, maybe in half.
President Bush, we’re told, doesn’t even like [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There is a gusher of news from the world of television lately - and maybe the end, we’re told, of TV as we know it. The common theme is the collision of television and the Internet, and everything going “on demand.”
Haven’t had enough of “The Fugitive,” “Eight is Enough,” or “Welcome [...]

Peter Drucker, one of the world’s leading thinkers on management, died Friday from natural causes at age 95 at his home in Claremont, California. During his six decades as a journalist, teacher, consultant and author of more than 35 books, he shaped many of today’s great leaders and corporations. Since 1971 he had been teaching [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It is a cold and lonely moment in the presidency of George W. Bush, and winter hasn’t even officially begun yet. His standing in the polls is at an all-time low and Americans give plenty of reasons for their dissatisfaction: a grinding war, huge deficits, White House scandal, and swooning [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
He was the golden child of a stern black preacher, grew up singing gospel with the sweetest voice anyone had ever heard and died chasing a hooker from a three dollar motel room in South Central LA.
In between, Sam Cooke conquered the American jukebox of the civil rights era with a gusher [...]

It started more than two weeks ago in a suburb of Paris, when two teenagers of African origin who thought they were being pursued by the police died hiding in a power substation, where they were electrocuted.
A generation of young Muslims took to the streets. They had no clear leaders. No defined end [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Two weeks of rioting, a state of emergency, the worst unrest in half a century — and France still doesn’t know what to do.
The French republican ideal says “colorblind citizenship.” The French reality of race is a large underclass of brown and black faces — African, Muslim, the children and grandchildren of [...]

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney recently indicted on felony charges in the Valerie Plame case, goes back to court in February. In the meantime, people are looking for more clues to the man — a lawyer, foreign policy guru, and a sometime novelist.
In 1996 Libby came [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
New York Times columnist Nick Kristof does something a little different with his space on the Times op-ed page. In a country awash in easy punditry and rant, Nick Kristof gets up out of his chair in New York and goes into the world.
Kristof heads into places like brothels in Cambodia, [...]

A leading computer security firm says that Sony is spying on thousands of listeners who buy and play CDs on their computers.
The controversial “spyware” software has been put on certain titles in the Sony music catalog, allegedly to curb the illegal pirating of its music.
John Borland explains more about Sony’s controversial “spyware.”
Guests:
John Borland, senior writer, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s a dangerous world, we know that. Last night hotels were blown up in Amman, Jordan. In California, indictments are being handed out on the attempted sale of surface to air missiles. But exactly how far should the US government go in domestic surveillance for counter- terrorism?
The fact appears to be [...]

Heather Mills McCartney, the wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador who has campaigned for over 14 years to rid the world of landmines.
In this radio diary, she talks about how she recently became an animal rights activist and PETA spokesperson.
Guests:
Heather Mills McCartney, anti-landmines and animal rights activist.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, has been called the most successful radical organization in America. The group’s animal rights commandos are famous and infamous for their high-drama stunts and claims.
PETA activists have thrown paint on fur coats, gone naked for animal rights, thrown a dead raccoon on Vogue [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s the case that first came over the wires when Samuel Alito was nominated by President Bush to Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the Supreme Court: “Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.” The issue in that case: Pennsylvania’s “spousal notification law” requiring a wife to notify her husband before she had an abortion.
Judge Alito [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You want her house. She wants your car. He wants your wife. They want more money.
Humans beings are cauldrons of desire. From the moment we wake up to the last raid on the fridge — and sometimes even in our dreams — we want fame, fortune, a piece of cake, a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For a generation and more now, millions of the youngest Americans have spent their days in child care, day care, or pre-school while mom and dad went off to work. And what has it got them? Higher math and reading skills, say two big new studies, especially for the poor, but [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When historian Doris Kearns Goodwin takes on the story of a president, she swings for the fences. And she’s delivered, with out-of-the-park successful biographies of JFK, LBJ and, above all, the big FDR biography “No Ordinary Time,” which won Goodwin the Pulitzer Prize.
Trouble is, her critics say, she’s played with a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Senator John McCain has a way of writing books when he’s gearing up for a run for the presidency. He did it in 1999 with “Faith of My Fathers,” in advance of his 2000 run for the White House. George W. Bush won that fight, with a promise to clean up Washington.
Now [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Once upon a time in America, there was the Great Depression and a vast World War, and a soundtrack that shimmered with hot brass and moonlight and romance.
At the heart of the swing era was trombonist and big band leader Tommy Dorsey. He was the driven kid from Pennsylvania coal country [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s springtime in Argentina, but not for George Bush and the United States. The U.S. president is outside of Buenos Aires today, at a summit of thirty-four Western hemisphere leaders. Everyone is there except for Fidel Castro, but with Venezuela’s fiery populist president Hugo Chavez very much on hand, even [...]