The seeds for next year’s Oscars may have been planted at last week’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. One filmmaker who made a big splash there was 22-year-old Roger Ingraham.
His film, “Moonshine,” was made in his home town of Stafford Springs, Connecticut, on a budget of ninety two hundred dollars — his entire [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Author Annie Proulx doesn’t like it called the “gay cowboy movie” but whatever you call it, “Brokeback Mountain” ran away with the Oscar nominations this morning — eight in total, including one for best picture, best director and best actor.
Academy Awards night is still five weeks away, but the nominations are flying [...]

Coretta Scott King died in her sleep last night at the age of 78. The wife of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., she was also a force in the movement in her own right.
Joining us to talk about the life of Ms. King is Lonnie Bunch. He is the Founding Director [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
After eighteen and a half years and the longest economic expansion in American history, the end has finally come. Today is the last day on the job as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank for Alan Greenspan.
He’s been called the Michael Jordan, the Lance Armstrong, the Gary Kasparov of central bankers. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to human happiness, the ancients were under no illusions. “The gate is narrow, and the way is hard,” says the Bible. And without the gods on your side, thought the ancient Greeks, the search was hopeless.
By the time of the Enlightenment and the American Declaration of Independence, the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There is news from the Pentagon this weekend that the US Army is now promoting 97 percent of all captains to the rank of major, a dramatic jump in promotion rates, and more evidence — say critics inside the military and out — that the army is lowering standards because it is [...]

Twelve years ago, in the midterm Congressional elections, the Republican Revolution descended on Washington. This year, there is another midterm election, and the tide might be turning.
President Bush’s approval ratings are a low 43 percent according to this morning’s LA-Times poll. The Jack Abramoff scandal is reaching deep into the Republican Party.
The Democrats are [...]

Milton Hershey dreamed big. The Pennsylvania farm kid, with more moxie than money, created a chocolate empire that still reigns supreme. And his cravings went far beyond the chocolate bar.
Hershey’s business success was matched by his devotion to social improvement. He built a company town to house his workers. He started up a school [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On January 27, 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born is Salzburg, Austria. Within six years, he would be performing before the Austrian empress. Within thirty-five years — the span of his musical miracle of a life — he would compose a continent of music so astounding that it struck even his contemporaries [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There’s an earthquake in Mideast politics today. Palestinians have gone to the polls and elected, it appears, Hamas to power. Hamas, which runs medical clinics and charity networks across the impoverished West Bank and Gaza, is seen by many Palestinians as a champion of clean government.
Hamas is the Islamic militant group that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Writer Nora Vincent is a lanky five-ten tall and wears a size eleven-and-a-half shoe. With a voice on the low side, she’s a born tomboy. For eighteen months, she put all that together with a change of clothes, a macho haircut, and fake stubble to pose — pretty effectively — as a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Yesterday, the Ford Motor Company announced that thirty thousand jobs will be cut and fourteen plants will be closed. And the great-grandson of founder Henry Ford says this is the “Way Forward”. Well, maybe. We’d better pray he’s right, and we do.
But if the way forward for American manufacturing [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
All Americans know the story. In 1607, English adventurers moored their tall-masted ships off the coast of Virginia, declared the rough colony of Jamestown, and came face-to-face with the American vastness and the native inhabitants.
Things went badly. Chief Powhatan was not happy. Captain John Smith was soon about to be killed. The [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
One month ago, when word of President Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretapping push became public, the buzz was “constitutional crisis.” Legal scholars, Democratic opponents, and many conservative Republicans said this was illegal — that it was putting the presidency above the law.
This week, in a bold move that could create precedent for generations, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ask any pet lover or cow poke — we know, or think we know, that cats and dogs and horses have personalities. Who could miss them? But what about an octopus? A hyena? A tortoise? A guppy?
After most of a century of looking the other way, behavioral [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was a parade of arrests in Tokyo, Japan today — starting with Takafumi Horie, the brash, young entrepreneur whose Internet company’s hiccup last week brought Japan’s high-flying stock market crashing to a close.
After a long decade of economic stagnation, the once-unstoppable Japan has come steaming back. But the world has changed.
China [...]

“Wicked” Wilson Pickett, one of America’s great pioneers of soul music, died yesterday. He was 64. His string of 1960s smash soul hits included, “Mustang Sally”, “Midnight Hour” and “634-5789″.
Pop culture critic Renee Graham talks about Pickett’s life and legacy.
Guests:
Pop culture critic Renee Graham.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Forty years ago this month, the young life of Martin Luther King, Jr. was rushing toward its tragic, glorious, world-moving crescendo. He was 37 years old. He had marched in Selma; lived to see a southern American president say “we shall overcome” and act to prove it; won a Nobel [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You remember the wide open promise of the World Wide Web, right? This was to be the untrammeled, free range domain of digital liberation, a new world of freedom. Well, yes and no.
You can search for whatever you like, but type in “democracy” in China’s blogosphere, or “human rights” or “women” [...]

The Bush administration is taking more heat on global warming. This time, the critics are former EPA administrators.
Six former heads of the agency –five Republicans and one Democrat– sounded off yesterday at an event to mark the agency’s 35th anniversary. They didn’t mince words.
Russell Train, EPA chief under Presidents Nixon and Ford, called the current [...]

The fate of Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, hangs in the balance today. Carroll was kidnapped on January 7th in Baghdad. A brief video of her was released Tuesday. Her kidnappers, reportedly the so-called “Brigade of Revenge,” say they will kill her tomorrow — Friday — unless [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to defining the canon of English literary greats, The Norton Anthology of English Literature is the world’s big gun. Since 1962, in eight million copies lugged across campus by generations of dutiful students, The Norton Anthology has been the who’s in/who’s out arbiter of what is great, what matters, [...]

A hedge fund manager and long-time Wall Street veteran shares his insight into the high-stakes, secretive world of hedge funds.
Guests:
Barton Biggs, long-time veteran of Morgan Stanley. He formed the firm’s research department and investment management division, which he chaired for 30 years. He was a member of a five-man executive committee that ran [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It is reform week in Washington DC. With corruption indictments flying and more expected, suddenly everyone’s a good government crusader — even GOP Congressional leaders who about five minutes ago — it seems — were practically celebrating their big money embrace of K Street and the Washington lobbyist cash machine.
Democrats are [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you think reindeer only fly in Santa stories, think again. In northeast Siberia, in the coldest inhabited country on earth, in the shaman stories of the Eveny people, reindeer fly all the time. At 96 below zero, over impassable terrain, over hundreds of miles in endless nights and days, they [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you’re looking for a strategic mind game of the first order, with real world implications to boggle the biggest brainiac, here it is: Iran and the nuclear weapons. Iran denies and denies and moves forward. Last week it broke the locks on uranium processing facilities — and broke even the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Three hundred years ago today, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, but colonial Boston was much too conservative to hold young Ben.
Barely out of short pants, Franklin was out in the world — inventing Poor Richard’s Almanac and lightening rods, inventing lending libraries and allies in revolution, inventing the odometer and bifocals [...]

The stars come out last night in Hollywood for the Golden Globe Awards. The top contender was “Brokeback Mountain” which came away with 4 awards. The movie about two cowboys grappling with their love for each other had picked up seven nominations, including “Best Picture.”
Ken Harvey saw the movie with his husband in a theatre [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Judge Sam Alito answered more than 700 questions last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. His wife cried. He kept his cool. The phrase he used most often in five days of hearings was, by the Washington Post’s count, “I don’t know.”
But there’s a lot we do know now [...]

Today, the nation honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The slain civil rights leader would have turned 77 on Sunday. Tribute was paid at Riverside Church in New York yesterday.
Riverside has a special place in King’s history. On April 4, 1967, King delivered his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech from its pulpit.
Yesterday from that same [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
At the cruel intersection of genetics, poor diet, obesity and poverty, a new epidemic is unfolding in the United States. Diabetes is now the country’s leading cause of adult blindness, lower-limb amputation, kidney disease and nerve damage.
Two- thirds of diabetics die from heart attack or stroke. Type 2 diabetes — once [...]

by host Tom Ashbrook:
The attack last Friday in northwest Pakistan is believed to have been CIA directed. Missiles, fired remotely from a Predator aircraft, were targeting very senior leaders of Al Qaeda.
At last report, eighteen civilians in the village died when three houses were blown away in the night. Pakistani officials say prime target [...]

This show featured a panel discussion sponsored by the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University which was titled “Being Jewish in Germany Today: Rebirth of a Community.”
The speakers were author Esther Dischereit and Jeffrey Peck, Professor of Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University.
The moderator was Sabine Von Mering, Assistant Professor of German, and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There is a land at the vast, windswept meeting of Siberia and Mongolia, where humankind’s most ancient, nomadic past still lives in song. The place is called Tuva, and the Tuva throat singers do today what ages of pastoral herders have done on those vast grasslands.
The Tuva singers produce harmonies within [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There have been tears and shame in South Korea for the last three weeks — for a monumental scientific hoax in stem cell research. Snuppy the puppy was indeed cloned, we are now told. But the towering claims of giant South Korean strides in human therapeutic cloning of stem cells: [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Terry Martin Hekker has a head-spinning personal story that illuminates a stubborn national story about women, work and home.
Twenty-five years ago, when feminism was sending American women piling into the workforce, Terry Hekker stayed home. She had five kids and celebrated the stay-at-home life, becoming a kind a national spokeswoman for “staying [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush made his claim that “a great city will rise again” in New Orleans. Yesterday, New Orleans’ own rebuilding commission outlined plans that, in effect, said “maybe.” And at least one prominent economist is now saying “never.”
Angry New Orleans residents are steamed at being [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Economic growth makes rich countries. It also — at the dawn of the 21st century — raises a lot of questions about the impact of unending growth on the environment, on endless sprawl, on cultures thrown into the spin cycle of globalization.
Bigfoot economist Benjamin Friedman says get over it. Growth, he [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Bird flu is getting closer. Poultry is dying, in Biblical numbers we’re told, in Turkey. Fifteen human cases confirmed there. Three Turks dead in the first human outbreak outside East Asia.
Europe, next door, is slamming down the hatches. No duck hunting in Cyprus. Bulgaria is disinfecting incoming cars. [...]

US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad are continuing the search for 28-year-old American reporter Jill Carroll. She has been freelancing from Iraq for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor.
Hear an update on the latest from BBC’s Alistair Leithhead.
Guests:
Alistair Leithhead, reporter for the BBC in Baghdad.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you are an Arabic speaker in America these days, Uncle Sam wants you badly. The Army and Marines are paying ten thousand dollar signing bonuses for fluent Arabic speakers. The CIA is paying up to thirty-five thousand, just to join. And still, the United States finds itself nearly [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The country went a dozen years without a single change on the U.S. Supreme Court and, in a matter of the last few months, there were two vacancies. Chief Justice John Roberts is already on the bench. Today is grilling time for nominee Judge Samuel Alito before the Samuel Alito before the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Modern medicine works miracles. It also breaks the bank — and nowhere more ferociously than in the United States.
After a brief pause in the HMO grip of the 1990s, American spending on health care is soaring again. By 2014, it is projected to hit $11,000 per American per year.
Costs like [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“We the People,” it famously begins, “in order to create a more perfect union…,” and eight thousand words later, you will have read the American Constitution. In Washington today, U.S. Senators will make opening statements on the nomination of Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court. But the document behind [...]

Fashion and image aside, the new NBA dress code results in some new challenges for players. Just imagine how hard it is to find dress shoes in size 22. For years, NBA players have made a beeline for Friedman’s in Atlanta.
In this radio diary, the store owner talks about the challenges for his big-footed customers, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Basketball was born in the USA, but today it’s gone global in a big, big way. Never mind the towering evidence on American NBA courts - Yao Ming and Manu Ginobili and Dirk Nowitzki. The evidence is worldwide. Basketball is the planet’s fastest growing sport.
But the great game of hoops is [...]