By host Tom Ashbrook:
The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, wrote more than 200 years ago about the all-powerful “invisible hand” of the market. It was tough, he said, but good for all.
The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was the great champion of the invisible hand and free markets. Governments, he said, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Back when defenders of the war in Iraq were still sure of themselves, some of them tossed off terms like “roach motel” and “the flypaper strategy.” The idea was that terrorists from around the world would be lured into Iraq and would fight their last. They’d check in, and not check [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
By 2014, just eight years from now, the No Child Left Behind Act mandates that there be no racial achievement gap in American education — none. All children — black, white, Hispanic, Asian — will be performing on the same bell curve of test scores.
It’s a tough deadline and a beautiful [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Democrats are on their way. The new majority in the House and Senate is cranking up, choosing leaders, naming committee chairs, grabbing prime office space on Capitol Hill.
Come next January 4th, when the 110th Congress convenes, Democrats will hold the gavel. And what will they do with it? On [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The testimony last week was heart-wrenching: a girl of fourteen forced by a polygamist religious leader to marry her cousin and submit to sex she did not want with a man she did not love. “It was the darkest time of my entire life,” she said.
But wait. The world [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The White House does not, does not, does not want to call it a civil war. But at a certain point, the political spin doctors do not get the last word. The death tolls are through the roof. Sunni and Shiite militias are slugging it out with exploding sophistication [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
At the height of the counter-culture, anti-war movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the musical backdrop of millions of young Americans lives was made by the iconic group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with songs like “Ohio,” “Teach Your Children,” “Wooden Ships,” and “Woodstock.”
In the years since, a lot of music and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Centers for Disease Control now estimates that one in every 166 American children is born with autism. That adds up to a lot of kids, grandkids, neighbors, schoolmates. What was once considered rare can now look like an epidemic, cause still unknown.
Autism and autistic children challenge even the most [...]

Today we bring you Day Two of our Thanksgiving holiday special, sharing readings and conversations from the annual New Yorker Festival. In this hour, you’ll hear plenty of humor and humorists, and a little something about shoes.
New Yorker editor David Remnick talks with the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart about American media culture. Hollywood [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Hollywood’s America is no stranger to angry men in big violent worlds — solitary anti-heroes fighting fire with fire while life rolls on for us, mere mortals. Trace that theme back and you come to two giants of the Western — director John Ford and actor John Wayne.
In 1956, at the height [...]

Once a year, the writers and editors of the New Yorker magazine jump off the page to read their own work and talk with artists for the New Yorker Festival. And we pull together the best of those readings and conversations for an On Point Thanksgiving holiday treat. Today and tomorrow we have [...]

On this Thanksgiving Day, we’re talking turkey, stuffing–and a whole lot more. The nation’s taste buds and eating habits have come a long way since the Pilgrims, even since your mother’s holiday table.
The “French’s Green Bean Casserole” now shares a trivet with fingerling potatoes. Ordinary salads have sprouted all kinds of greens. A little orange [...]

Director Robert Altman died this past Monday evening at the age of 81. The five-time Academy Award nominee for best director was best known for “M.A.S.H,” “Nashville,” and “The Player.” His most recent films were “Gosford Park” and “A Prairie Home Companion.”
We look back at his extraordinary career.
Guests:
Mitchell Zuckoff, a Boston University journalism professor and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
All over America tomorrow, after the bird is carved and the Thanksgiving gravy is socked away, millions of televisions will click on — lock on! — to the drama and hoopla and slam dance of NFL football. Tomorrow, it will be Cowboys and Broncos and Lions and more, each with ten [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The public clamor over genocide in Darfur is almost off the hook now. Church groups and congressmen and college kids and today, again, the UN, are all raising holy hell over the hell unfolding in western Sudan.
Now, even the Holocaust Museum in Washington is bathing its outside walls every night with [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s a conundrum for you: a smaller portion of American households include married couples than ever before — a minority now, says the Census Bureau, just 47 percent. But among Americans who are married, the spouse is being leaned on now — more than ever before — to be everything: [...]

The Lebanese minister, Christian leader, and leading anti-Syria politician Pierre Gemayel was shot and killed today in Beirut. The assassination of Gemayel, the son of former president Amin Gemayel, comes amid a crisis in Lebanese politics, after the recent resignation of six pro-Syrian ministers from the cabinet.
We get the latest details.
Guests:
Chistopher Dickey, Mideast regional editor [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Believe it or not — or maybe you remember — there was a time when air travel could reek of elegance. Wine lists, gracious smiles, on-time arrivals. Of course, it cost a lot more, too.
But today — with security quagmires, mounds of lost luggage, and cattle-car cabins — travelers can feel [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Remarkably, James Bond is back in the movie theaters and headlines. “Casino Royale,” with the new “blonde Bond,” Daniel Craig, opened over the weekend with a $40 million US box office.
The new Bond may look like Vladimir Putin on steroids, but he pulls off the greatest Bond trick of all — keeping [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The mega-billions are flying on Wall Street today, but not in a game you’re likely to play. “Private equity” — super fat-cat private wealth — is buying up publicly-traded companies off the stock exchanges like never before, and taking them private to rework and resell, they hope, for fantastic profits.
If you [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Lords and ladies, knights and castles, kings and queens in splendor — the Middle Ages still have a hold on the 21st century imagination. An image partly romantic, partly brutal, and always good for a Monty Python laugh.
Time traveler Thomas Cahill has made himself one of the best-selling historians in history with his [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
The status quo certainly got stirred, if not shaken this week.
First woman Speaker of the House was voted in: Nancy Pelosi. The first black man was memorialized on the National Mall: Martin Luther King. Milton Friedman is dead. Jack Abramoff is in jail. Clear Channel’s media empire is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There are 23,000 species of fish on the planet, maybe more. And the family Americans love to fish on freshwater more than any other is the bass — large-mouth bass, small-mouthed bass.
The bass is game. It hits the lure with power. Goes aerial on the hook. Lunges explosively for [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The frustration was palpable. The questions were sharp and with a new edge. The general in the hot seat looked anything but happy.
In the first testimony on the Iraq War before Congress since the thunderclap of the midterm elections, General John Abizaid, the top US commander in Iraq, said yesterday that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
They came out of San Angelo, Texas in what seemed like a sweet Texas whirlwind. But the backstory of “Los Lonely Boys” — multi-platinum Grammy winners on the road to superstardom — is not a story of overnight sensation.
It’s a Mexican-American story of dreams and struggle and “Texican pride” — of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Thirty-plus years after the end of the Vietnam War, Hanoi is the center of the Asia-Pacific economic world for the next week. Leaders from twenty-one nations, including George W. Bush, will gather for a big economic summit in the land where 50,000 American soldiers died fighting communism.
Yesterday, the US Congress gave Vietnam [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We live in the age of hyper-gadgetry, and of a desperate longing to simplify. Lives loaded with high technology that promises power and convenience, and leave us spluttering in frustration over tangled software and hundred-page user manuals.
The super cell phone that won’t take a call. The PC that dazzles and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Another awful day today in Iraq with mass kidnappings and no doubt killings to follow. And, pressure grows on Washington to do something to change course.
Now Britain’s Tony Blair says “talk to the neighbors.” Former Secretary of State James Baker has indicated he may say the same. Secretary of Defense in waiting, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Elizabeth Edwards has always been the wife, not the candidate, but she knows how to make news. When her husband John Edwards was on the White House ticket in ‘04, she was not shy about saying Lynn Cheney should settle down about public discussion of the Cheneys’ daughter’s homosexuality.
Just last month, she [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We promise, we swear, it will not be “all politics all the time” here. But just for today, with the mid-term thumpin’ behind us, and the ‘08 presidential race already coming up like thunder, we’re going to peek ahead, with two big analysts, at what it takes to win the White [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Comedian, playwright and actress Amy Sedaris is taking on new turf in her latest outing.
She still gets called wacky, anxious, depraved, earnest and a little dangerous behind her big smile and bouncing curls. Now she’s pouring all that into a new role: cookbook doyenne, entertainment maven and all around guide to [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Call it a “thumpin.” President Bush does. It’s official. Both houses have gone to the Democrats.
After weeks of wonder and worry — even among conservatives — about whether voters would step up and call the GOP to account for scandal and botched war and executive over-reach, this week American [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the story: in 2006, a creaking slave ship full of bones hauls up out of the Hudson River at the feet of the Statue of Liberty. And New York City — mainly black New York City, but white too — goes into a fit of deep anger, attraction, revulsion, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Last week, George Bush told the world Donald Rumsfeld, was doing a “fantastic” job as secretary of defense. Today, Rumsfeld is out — resigned or fired, depending on your interpretation.
The sorry state of the Iraq war lit the fire, but the war has been going badly for a long time now. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Change” is the big word of the day, with a resounding midterm vote sending new blood into Congress and statehouses across the country. But how much change Americans are in the market for, and in what direction, still feel like open questions today.
Real change is not easy. It’s often ducked. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The people have spoken and it’s house-cleaning time in Washington DC.
Just two years after a newly-re-elected President Bush trumpeted his “political capital” and Karl Rove dreamed of a “permanent majority” for the GOP, the Democrats have retaken the House and made a mighty run — outcome still unclear — for the Senate [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We’ve heard it before and turned back to our tuna sandwiches — the world’s fisheries are in big trouble. But this time, the headline was a screamer: “global collapse” of all species currently fished by 2050.
Everything, essentially, except jellyfish and sea slime will be gone from the seas. And [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Nobody knows what the final outcome of today’s midterm elections will be. After all the opinion polls and punditry and talk of washout and watershed, it is the voters’ day to decide.
But the sizzle around this campaign season has grown from the expectation that this might be a big one — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It may be the age of YouTube and the Internet, but in the homestretch of the midterm elections, it is straight-in-your-face traditional media — especially television — that is popping with campaign ads this season.
Two billion dollars spent on political and so-called “issue ads” in this campaign — a new record, and [...]

The captured Iraqi dictator was sentenced to death yesterday at his Baghdad trial for war crimes against the Shiites.
President Bush called the verdict “a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.”
Was justice served? Was it worth it?
For perspective, we ask Graham Allison, director of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
One way or another, the American votes will land tomorrow. And we will soon know what the midterm election verdict is for Washington: Democrats cleaning house, or Republicans hanging on.
Much of the campaign debate has been accountability for what’s gone on — war, scandal, deficits, division. But after tomorrow, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the space of a year that pivoted on 1971, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison of the Doors were all dead of drug overdose — rock giants all dead before they were 28-years-old.
The sixties had bloomed and collapsed. An angry war slogged on in Vietnam. And in an [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
And there came at last the eve of an election like few others in modern memory — a midterm election being cast as a last-ditch national battle for the country’s soul for democracy, for accountability, for survival.
In the news this week: red wine and California fire and a new global-warming alarm. [...]

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet has won acclaim for his work on the stage and screen, from “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “American Buffalo” to “The Spanish Prisoner” and “Wag the Dog.”
In his new book “The Wicked Son,” Mamet takes a provocative look at Jewish identity and anti-Semitism.
The book’s title refers to the child at the [...]

Guests:

By host Tom Ashbrook:
New Yorker magazine writer Jeffrey Goldberg grew up taunted by history and anti-Semitism, an American Jew eager to lift a rifle for Israel. He joined the Israeli Army in the first Intifadah, and was assigned to help guard a prison holding Palestinian leaders of that uprising.
The cruelties he saw there offended [...]