By host Anthony Brooks:
It’s rare when a new singer comes along who evokes the sound, soul and passion of a time gone by, while making it all her own. It is rarer still when she’s just 17.
Sonya Kitchell grew up absorbing the great folk and blues artists of her parents’ generation. She’s already recorded a [...]

Independence Day is a few days away. We break out the steaks, burgers, and hot dogs and fire up the story of the American grill with chef Steven Johnson. We also endeavor to do something never before heard on radio: grill littleneck clams.
Guests:
Steven Johnson, owner and executive chef at Rendezvous restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
The big story that official Washington, the nation and much of the world is still digesting is the stunning rebuke the Supreme Court dealt the Bush Administration yesterday. The high court called the President’s plan for military tribunals at Guantanamo unconstitutional. That’s among the issues our weekly panel of journalists [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
The Supreme Court has dealt President Bush a stunning rebuke in his efforts to expand his war-time authority. In a landmark ruling today, the high court says the Bush Administration over-stepped its constitutional authority when it set up military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
Some 450 detainees, whom the government had called [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
The New York Times’ decision to run a story about a secret government program to track international terrorist finances has sparked a noisy debate about national security, and the responsibilities — and rights — of a free press.
Conservative bloggers and commentators accuse the Times of “treason.” President Bush calls the [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
In his new book, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind calls the guiding principal of the Bush Administration’s fight against global terror “The One Percent Doctrine.” It says that if there’s a one percent chance that al-Qaeda can get weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. must respond to the threat as if [...]

In the era of cell phones, email, and MySpace you might think that Americans are more connected to their closest friends than ever. But in fact, they’re more alone. At least that’s the conclusion of new research.
According to the new study, one in four Americans say they have no one to talk to [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
For 41 years, reporter Joseph Galloway has covered America’s wars — from the first major ground offensive in Vietnam to the current war in Iraq.
Galloway has never permitted journalistic objectivity to hide his deep affection for soldiers. In Vietnam, he huddled in the muddy foxholes with the grunts, picked up a [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
Once upon a time Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa, its charismatic leader, Robert Mugabe, one of the heroes of post-colonial African independence.
But today, Zimbabwe is an economic disaster — with inflation running above a thousand percent. Farmlands lie fallow, food shortages are rampant. And The U.N. says half of [...]

By host Anthony Brooks:
By the time Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, the American economy was in a state of shock. The New York Stock Exchange was shut down, more than five thousand banks had failed, soup kitchens were working overtime, and the jobless rate in some cities ran as high as 80 percent.
In the [...]

By host Anthony Brooks:
Not long ago the head-lines from urban America were all about dropping crime-rates and dramatic reductions in homicides. But today, many cities across the country are being hit again by a troubling escalation of gun violence.
Mayors from Seattle to Milwaukee to New York are alarmed by what they say is a thriving [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
You might have thought that the debate over commercial whaling was over and that the battle to save the whales was won. Well, think again. At its annual meeting in the Caribbean this week, The International Whaling Commission shook up the politics of whaling — and shocked those who have [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
This week saw seven Marines and one Navy corpsman charged with murder and kidnapping in Iraq. It also featured a failed effort by Senate Democrats to set a date on the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The facts on the ground, and the politics of war and peace at home are [...]

By Anthony Brooks:
In America’s high-paced, strive-for-success-go-for-the-gold-meritocracy, it’s never too soon to start jockeying for advantage. That explains in part a booming industry that has many parents convinced that Mozart and inter-active alphabet games are as vital to their infants’ development as a mother’s milk.
Never mind that there’s slim scientific evidence that Mozart or a [...]

By Anthony Brooks:
Whether or not North Korea goes ahead with an apparent plan to test-launch a long-range missile, the threat to do so is escalating international tensions from Pyongyang to Tokyo to Washington.
Chief among the fears is that the test-launch could move the isolated Stalinist regime one step closer to being able to hit the [...]

Preparations for the potential fallout from global warming were underway this week on the arctic island of Svalbard, in Norway.
That’s where the construction of a new “doomsday” vault, a “Noah’s Ark” of agriculture, that will house and safeguard all known varieties of the world’s crops began this past Monday.
Guests:
Cary Fowler, Executive Secretary of The Global [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Scientists who believe we are on the road to an earthly hell of global warming — and that is the vast majority of scientists these days — are desperate to find a way to whack America with the two-by-four that will really wake it up to the danger they see. It’s been [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Barbaric” is the word out of Iraq today. As in barbaric torture of two captured US soldiers, their unrecognizable bodies apparently recovered Monday night south of Baghdad, at the end of a road so booby-trapped with bombs it took twelve hours for a recovery team to work its way to the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Just weeks after US-led forces toppled the Taliban in January 2002, young Rory Stewart stood at the western edge of Afghanistan, ready — incredibly — to walk in the winter through mountains, across a famously rugged country torn by decades of infamously brutal war.
The young Scotsman was no naive fool. He had [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
He was the boy genius who made billions, the proudly geeky face of Microsoft who set out to put a personal computer on every desktop, and his own software on every computer.
Now Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has announced he’ll be stepping back at Microsoft and stepping into fulltime philanthropy on [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s five alarm fire time for America’s traditional news media. Newspaper and network TV news are losing readers and viewers hand over fist. Advertisers are running to the Internet. Newspaper profits are swooning and big layoffs have hit major publishers’ newsrooms.
Nightly network news viewership has fallen almost in half in the last [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the word on the street — Wall Street, Main street, maybe your street: the honeymoon is over for Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke, and the wedding crasher is inflation. Consumers prices for the first five months of this year are pumping ahead at a 5.2 percent annual rate, compared to [...]

After Suz Redfearn received a box full of letters, her relationship with her father would never be the same.
Guests:
Suz Redfearn is a writer living in Falls Church, VA.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Some men have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. Bill Buford had a midlife crisis and ran into the kitchen. Not just any kitchen, but the wild, flaming, hellish heaven of the kitchen of superstar chef Mario Batali, and into the madness and romance of extreme Italian cooking.
Bill [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There were big, intersecting lines of war and politics in Washington this week. Bush went in and out of Baghdad. Karl Rove got out of legal jeopardy, off the grand jury’s leash, and back in the thick of political framing. Congress started debating Iraq but is staring at the November [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ramesh Ponnuru is young, smart, passionate and a great bright hope of the American right. At 31, he’s a senior editor at the conservative National Review. He’s been published all over, and even had his media-baptism on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
He’s a Kansas wunderkind. He’s the child of a Hindu [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If all those incoming college freshmen and their families want to know how on earth they are going to pay for college, they could ask America’s newest college grads. It takes a mountain of cash and grants and loans and sweat and pain and, increasingly, debt.
The average college senior in the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If the movies are America’s national dream life, then movie critics are the country’s interpreters of dreams. Sitting in the flickering dark as if at our elbows, watching, judging, interpreting. Articulating what we may only feel.
On the way out of the theater, everyone’s a critic. But from the days [...]

What movie experience would be complete without watching the trailers? This summer’s no exception but with a twist: homemade trailers. The upcoming thriller “Snakes on a Plane” has inspired a treasure trove of songs, fake music videos, and more.
Guests:
Jon Fine, media columnist, Business Week.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Seize the day, seize the moment,” George Bush told the Iraqi people in Baghdad yesterday. And the president certainly had done just that, slipping away from a Camp David war council and flying secretly into the world’s most violent real estate, hard on the heels of the killing of Musab al [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist John Updike made his name writing about white, suburban Americans living white suburban lives. But he’s taken his show and novelist’s eye on the road — to Africa in “The Coup,” and to apocalypse in “Toward the End of Time.”
Now, at 74, Updike is projecting himself into the mind of [...]

Thirty-five years ago today, on June 13th, 1971, the New York Times began publishing what later became known as the Pentagon Papers. Released by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg — Marine, Pentagon official and State Department officer in Vietnam — the 7000 classified pages told the history of American government’s cover-up in Vietnam.
On the 35th anniversary of [...]

The news out of Washington today: President Bush made a surprise visit in Baghdad, and top presidential advisor Karl Rove will not be charged with any crimes in the Valerie Plame leak case, according to Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin. Luskin said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gave him the news on Monday.
For perspective, we turn [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Scotsman Niall Ferguson is the historian liberals love to hate. He is - the British press points out - precociously right-wing, a little too rich, and annoyingly handsome.
He also has a penchant for empires, for looking back and seeing the good in the British Empire. For looking out today and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the nightmare scenario that no one wants and everyone risks: you check into the hospital to be stitched-up, cured, and saved. A doctor or nurse or dirty door knob passes you an antibiotic-resistant superbug. And you check out with more trouble than you came with. Or worse, check [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On September 10, 2001, Elisabeth Bumiller took her spot as White House correspondent for the New York Times. The next day made history. The next nearly five years saw the Bush administration push executive powers and presidential secrecy to head-turning new frontiers.
Bumiller covered it all, from her vantage, in her [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
In a sweeping study released last week on Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers accepted responsibility for a weak and incomplete hurricane protection system.
But according to Big Easy historian Douglas Brinkley, that only partly explains why Katrina decimated much of the Gulf coast, flooded more than 80 percent of New [...]

By guest host Anthony Brooks:
This week began with more suicide bombings and the continued investigation of alleged atrocities by U.S. Marines in Iraq. But with the killing of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the week is ending with a major shot of confidence for the U.S. military.
Is it a turning point in Iraq? That’s [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The world of Christian rock is so big these days that if you’re in it sometimes you can hardly see out, and if you don’t know it, you don’t know a big chunk of this country.
P.O.D., Newsboys, Switchfoot, Jars of Clay — these groups and a pile of others are selling more [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was personal with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. When American businessman Nicholas Berg’s head was cut off on videotape, the voice of the knife-wielding cutter was identified as Zarqawi’s.
He dreamed, along with Sunni terror chief Osama bin Laden, of a new Islamic caliphate stretching far across the Middle East. He hated Americans. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Some days the rain of tsunami, war, plague and quake can seem like Biblical overkill. And still, wherever roofs fall in and villages burn, where hungry children cry and families flee in the night, the world’s non-governmental humanitarian agencies are poised to move in.
But it’s a tough world out there. The challenges [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s the old story, now on a grand scale in Canada. Steven Vikash Chand’s neighbors said he seemed like “nice people.” Canadian prosecutors say Canadian Vikash Chand — 25, a convert to Islam — wanted to cut the head off Canada’s prime minister.
Canada is still reeling from the arrest of seventeen alleged [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In 1999, when the USA finished dead last in the World Cup, soccer fans wondered whether the land of grand passions for baseball, basketball and Super Bowl football would ever make its mark on the “world’s game.”
American women had taken it all in soccer, but men — not close. Then in [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It isn’t going to fly in the US Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to launch a constitutional amendment. It doesn’t get two-thirds support among the American people, where the latest Gallup poll shows 50 percent support a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
But that does not mean the issue is [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
At the dawn of the underwater world’s televised scuba era, when Jacques Cousteau began to introduce the air-bound world to the wonders of the sea, British marine biologist Trevor Norton was already there; slipping through kelp forests, marveling at the underwater plunge of the cormorant, exploring the seabeds that would become his second [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has a big moment in the sun right now.
For years, as Washington stood frozen in angry opposition to Iran’s theocracy, the mullahs in Tehran have seriously outplayed the U.S. on the nuclear front: dodging, feinting, blustering - and moving steadily ahead toward nuclear weapons.
Last week, Condoleeza Rice convinced [...]