By host Tom Ashbrook:
Twenty years ago this October, Wole Soyinka became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Now, at 72, that gilded moment is just one peak in an astonishing life story of letters and bold, even rash, political activism.
It’s been four decades since the young Nigerian writer and firebrand [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The 1990s are about to officially end on the nation’s highways. GM has announced it will end production of the giant Hummer H1.
Now, a stampede of stylish, sporty, gas-sipping tiny cars is headed onto the American roads. Not yet the teeny-tiny cars of Europe — those are coming — but a rush [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The urge is so strong, most people don’t fight it. In the presence of religion and religious icons — churches, temples, altars, scripture, holy relics from the Ganges riverbank to Rome — most people become reverent. Not Daniel Dennett.
Denett is a philosopher on a mission. His mission is to break [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has whipped up a small storm in the last few weeks with his call for the new embrace of an old idea: manliness.
Men acting manly, says Mansfield, are what this world needs more of. John Waynes and Teddy Roosevelts, Papa Hemmingways and Schwarzeneggers who stride the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The first Mardi Gras parade since Hurricane Katrina marched through New Orleans’ French Quarter this weekend, with their traditional barbed humor on display - even if many New Orleanians were not.
The bands played “Give Me that Mold Time Religion” and “C’est Levee” for the levees that did not hold. Mayor [...]

Exactly one year ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall and blasted a path of destruction across the Gulf Coast. The images of those left behind are heart wrenching: families stranded on their roofs, children wading through murky water, dead bodies floating face down.
Over 1,000 people were reportedly killed. 124,000 homes - mostly in Louisiana and Mississippi [...]

William Rhoden grew up in a segregated neighborhood in Chicago. He played football at a black college. He went on to be a sports columnist at the New York Times.
Along the way, Rhoden saw Mohammed Ali speak out against the Vietnam War. He watched American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos raise their fists for [...]

A month of bombings reduced the cities of southern Lebanon to rubble, but the rebuilding process is already underway. Bernard Khoury is a renowned architect based in Beirut and he has been watching the Hezbollah-led reconstruction effort.
Guests:
Bernard Khoury is a renowned architect in the Middle East and internationally.

Hezbollah’s popularity in war-torn Lebanon has only grown since the fighting with Israel stopped. On the last day of the bombing campaign, Hezbollah sent an impressive 246 rockets over the border. By the next day, its relief effort was in full force.
Flush with volunteers and Iranian money, Hezbollah took charge of the rebuilding [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
If the world could talk, what would it say to humans about our impact on the planet? Perhaps the voices of warning and the signs of change are all around us and humanity is not listening. Does humanity value the diversity and richness of nature? Will we miss it when and [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
In the news this week, has it been a mixed bag or a grab bag? Incumbents are nervous about the early signs of voter revolt in some US primaries. Iran tells the world to mind its own business regarding its nuclear program. The President tells America that staying the course in [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
War produces casualties, refugees, victories and defeats. War liberates people and it also takes prisoners. Prisoners of war are the human tokens exchanged between armies and nations when it is time to settle accounts and make peace.
But people caught in war’s prisons live in a world of precarious rules and sudden [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
The oil-exporting Shiite Islamic nation of Iran has skillfully emerged as a regional power broker since the U.S. invasion of Iraq with new influence from Afghanistan to Lebanon. Now it is signaling that it is willing to flex its muscle to the world community by acquiring a nuclear capability.
Can Iran be [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan nearly thirty years ago set in motion events that live in our headlines today. The war-torn nation that hosted the planners of 9/11, lived through the brutal Taliban regime, and then a U.S. invasion, is far from stable now… even with its supposedly pro-US government.
Reporter, activist, [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
How much is your wedding worth to you? What will it take to launch a young couple off into a lifetime of bliss? In dollar terms, if your wedding costs exceed the Gross Domestic Product of any nation in say OPEC, then you may be over the top.
Weddings these days are [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
So you’ve got your Lexis, you’ve got your olive tree — the world is flat, and a tsunami of globalization is going to remake it. You are all ready for the 21st century, right?
Thinkers from Tom Friedman to Milton Freidman say open markets and economic relationships are the key to global [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
Congress makes the laws, the courts interpret the laws, and the President enforces the laws, right? It’s the three part supposedly balanced system of government that lies at the heart of our constitution.
The power of Congress and the President have ebbed and flowed throughout history but are we at a turning [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
Do you open your pension junk mail — the yearly fliers that talk about how you are doing? There’s a box for how much you’ve put in - generally a demoralizingly small number; a box for how much your pension will grow in 40 years - usually a large number; [...]

By guest host John Hockenberry:
The plot busting British intelligence agents who foiled an alleged airline bombing caper have renewed calls to retool this country’s domestic spying program.
The British have taught a lot of bad lessons on how to govern but do they have anything to teach in the business of intelligence gathering? They’re more secretive, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“This is your brain,” the old saw might have gone. Simple. At rest. Blank. And this is your brain on music: Switched on, lit up, soaring, rocking.
Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin started out as a record producer, but couldn’t get over the brain science of music. What it is, exactly, that enchants us [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was a week of “not over yets.” First, a ceasefire in Lebanon early Monday with a Hezbollah claim of victory, and a Mideast conflict bitterly unresolved.
Most recently, a loud ruling at week’s end from a federal judge saying there are no kings in America and President Bush’s “warrantless wiretapping” is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh makes mothers hide their daughters and parsons block their ears. And he’s a hero to a generation of readers who came of age in the days of punk and grunge and hard-edged hip-hip.
Since his smash hit “Trainspotting” in the mid-’90s, he’s churned out a string of down-and-out and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook,
There is a dream version of Lebanon that once in fact existed: the thriving, diverse commercial center of the Middle East, a Mediterranean tapestry of faiths, with a good-times capitol in Beirut.
For the last year, the dream had even more luster, with the Cedar Revolution that pushed out Syria and held [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
For a decade now, the U.S. economy has been riding surging productivity and two giant bubbles: First, the tech bubble that went boom in 2000. Then the housing bubble that ballooned when the Federal Reserve took interest rates down to an astonishing 1 percent.
Now, housing has stalled out in more than half [...]

It may be off the front pages, but there’s still a war going in Iraq.
The latest: more U.S. troops, more deaths, and even more fears of civil war.
Guests:
Louise Roge, Baghdad correspondent for The Los Angeles Times
Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, author of “Defense Strategy for the Post [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Forty years ago this summer, Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, unleashing a painful decade of torture, humiliation, prison and exile for China.
In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping healed the wounds with market liberalization, and the seeds of China’s comeback. Now, a booming new China, still under [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Almost a year after the devastation and massive government incompetence in Hurricane Katrina, all Americans remember the great catastrophe.
But African-Americans think about it more. A new poll finds 18 percent of whites say they think about Katrina often. Among blacks, that number is 40 percent. The storm. The [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron knows a thing or two about life. And she shares. The story of her break-up as a young mother with Watergate star reporter Carl Bernstein is the thinly-veiled “Heartburn.”
She covered sex and the friendship of men and women in “When Harry Met Sally.” There was “Silkwood” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s not a perfect ceasefire, but thousands of displaced Lebanese are streaming home today, over cratered roads to ruined villages in the south of Lebanon. In Israel, the rain of Hezbollah rockets has stopped for now as both sides count their losses.
Hezbollah pamphlets have already claimed “divine victory” in the bloody month [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A new step in language from President Bush yesterday, on the tarmac in Green Bay, Wisconsin, after news of the foiled terror plot in Britain: “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists,” said the president. The idea is not new. But the stark language — not “Islamist” or “Al [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
This has been a week of trauma. For three-term Democratic senator and hawk Joe Lieberman, thrown overboard by Connecticut Democrats for his support of the Iraq war. For London and the whole world of air travel, as an alleged terrorist plot to blow up ten airliners over the Atlantic is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In 1783, the year George Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief and returned to Mount Vernon, Simon Bolivar was born to an aristocratic family in Caracas, Venezuela.
Bolivar would live to be the great Liberator of Spanish America — the southern hemisphere’s George Washington, and maybe more. Not one nation [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” says London’s deputy police commissioner today. Thwarted with twenty-one arrests in London and Birmingham. The alleged intended targets: as many as ten passenger airline flights from London to Washington, New York and California.
“A wave of attacks,” said the British Home Secretary, that would have caused [...]

Does war still work? Israeli troops struggle in Lebanon. US troops struggle in Iraq. We’ll ask what’s happened to warfare and the idea of victory.
Guests:
John Arquilla, Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and author of “Networks and Netwars: The Futue of Terror, Crime, and Militancy”;
Jonathan Schell, author of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You can start on the car lot. Last month, for the first time, Toyota out-sold Ford in the USA, Honda out-sold Daimler-Chrysler, and the Toyota Camry was the best-selling car in America.
Detroit is hanging on by only two percent to its majority of domestic auto sales. And by the end [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Israel was looking the other way — at withdrawal from Gaza and much of the West Bank, at school and business life. Then, this past July 12, two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon and all hell broke loose.
The Israeli military went for war –air war– [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In Napoleon, North Dakota, the winters are long and cold. The summers are short and hot and, for farm kids, hard. Debra Marquart grew up on a third generation family farm outside Napoleon - steering the tractor from the time she was five, wrestling with boys in the endless wheat [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There are a thousand miles of pipeline crisscrossing Alaska’s North Slope. Yesterday, corrosion in just sixteen of them shut down the largest oilfield in the United States indefinitely.
The shutdown has knocked out eight percent of the country’s crude oil production, sent gas and oil prices spiking again, and thrown a harsh [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Tour de France champion American Floyd Landis looks like a champ no more. The charge: testosterone doping. World-record 100-meter dash Olympic champ Justin Gatlin — ditto — testosterone in unnatural quantities.
It is a natural hormone is both men and women, but ten to twenty times more in men. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the booming world of Christian evangelical mega-churches these days, certain politics tend to be presumed: conservative, right-wing, Republican. And powerful Christian Right leaders have grown very close to the leadership of the GOP, which is — at the moment — the leadership of the country.
That, says Christian evangelical mega-church leader [...]

MTV at 25. Madonna, Dr. Dre, “The Real World” and the channel that launched a pop culture revolution.
Guests:
Craig Marks, editor-in-chief, Blender magazine
Chuck Klosterman, author, “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” and “Killing Yourself to Live”. He writes for Spin magazine, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. His forthcoming book is “Chuck Klosterman IV: [...]

Locked horns over Lebanon, heat waves and global warming, Mel Gibson, and more. We’ll dig into the hot stories of the week in our news roundtable.
Guests:
Carol Giacomo, diplomatic correspondent for Reuters
Kathleen Parker, Syndicated Columnist
Jack Beatty, On Point News Analyst, senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Behind all the urgent headlines from Lebanon and Iraq and the great heat wave of 2006, a deep fuse keeps burning under America’s future. It’s the federal deficit and American debt. It is huge, and on course to get much, much bigger. So big that it could one day [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In ten days, on August 13th, Fidel Castro turns 80, if he’s alive. Since word came down this week that an unwell Fidel was turning authority over to his brother Raul, Cuba and the Cuban Diaspora — from Miami to Washington to points worldwide — have been crackling with speculation about [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For generations, when Americans had a question about Gettysburg or Galileo or the state bird of Indiana, chances were they turned to the big old encyclopedia in the family den or school library. Today, a new world turns to Wikipedia — the interactive online encyclopedia written by everyone.
You can read the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For three and a half years, the fog of war and hope of success has kept millions of Americans from delivering a verdict on the war in Iraq. Death tolls and civil strife are way up. American public support is way down. And still, the hope of achieving an [...]