By host Tom Ashbrook:
High-rolling culture critic Greil Marcus has been mixing it up with America’s heart and soul, music and arts for a long time now. He’s gone deep on Elvis and Herman Melville, on rock and roll and punk rock, on Bob Dylan and the song of hillbillies.
Now, Marcus is looking beyond heart [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Every man is, or wants to be, an idler,” wrote the great Samuel Johnson in 1758. And he surely could have added every woman, too. From Johnson to Jack Kerouac to Ferris Bueller and the great age of Slackers, the appeal of lounging, loafing, goofing off, and vegging out has [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Hail, Caesar!” they still cry in the movies as once they saluted in the heart of ancient Rome and on battlefields from Gaul to Syria.
Julius Caesar — general, consul, dictator — is one of the most magnetic and controversial figures in all of history. Few have matched his power, his military [...]

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:
When the poachers came into Zambia’s Luangwa National Park, they were deadly effective and completely merciless. With their AK-47s and meat racks and tusk carriers to haul ivory off the savanna, they slaughtered 93 percent of the park’s once thriving elephant population.
Then came a UN crackdown on the ivory trade — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Dr. Bill Thomas may change your life, or at least the end of it. Thomas is a rebel and a visionary who doesn’t like the way old people get warehoused in America. He doesn’t like the nursing home layout, the smell, the food, the loneliness, the boredom, the way elders get [...]

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:
When the music rolled each week for “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, it was a truly national American event. Nearly 75 percent of the country’s TV households gathered at the TV screen for Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo — a true mass market.
Today, television’s number-one, top-rated TV show — CSI: [...]

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:
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 Tom Ashbrook:
Director Catherine Hardwicke made her name in Hollywood with tough, edgy films about teenagers in trouble. In “Lords of Dogtown,” she tracked the lonely young souls of California’s skateboard culture. In her breakout film “Thirteen,” she gave us the harrowing tale of young teenage girls in a world of trouble with [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A tough year, and a tough week — even into the heart of the holidays. A brand-spanking new Secretary of Defense, on his way to Iraq, says failure would be a calamity. But the President and Joint Chiefs are reported at odds on what to do next.
Surge or no surge, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The number one box office draw in America last weekend was Will Smith’s “The Pursuit of Happyness,” with a desperate, down and out father struggling to hit it big, save his family, and go rags-to-riches as stock broker.
For millions of Americans who have known the cold chill of hard times and the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The three climbers on the Tilly Jane trailhead on December 8th, beneath Oregon’s towering Mt. Hood, left behind a simple note at the warming hut at the ranger’s station: “We are a party of three attempting North Face,” they wrote. And that was it.
Up they went, to the summit it [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Legendary newspaper columnist and humorist Art Buchwald has always been the life of the party. This year, Buchwald’s party trick got serious. He almost died.
In February, with failing kidneys and the doctors saying he had only weeks to live, the 80-year-old wit checked in to a Washington hospice and prepared for [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“We’re not winning, but we’re not losing,” is the new formulation embraced now by President Bush on Iraq. But where does that leave the troops, the American men and women in the field, in the streets, in Iraq, where the frontlines are everywhere and the way home is always a season [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
“We make a living by what we get,” said Winston Churchill. “We make a life by what we give.” Some give billions these days — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett — and, well, they should for the billions they’ve made. But we’re not all billionaires.
Everyday across the country an informal army of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Donald Vance was a 29-year-old US Navy veteran working in Baghdad when the prison door slammed on him. Blindfolded, shackled, thrown on a concrete slab, and cut off from legal representation by an American system and American guards in an American-run detention center in Iraq. For 97 days.
Vance was not a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Let the reader beware,” warns novelist Thomas Pynchon, before the reader even begins Pynchon’s vast new novel, “Against the Day.”
And then we’re off, on a mad caper that can only be described, of course, as “Pynchonesque.” Starting high above the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 in a plummeting dirigible, then into [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
So, what will it be for US troops in Iraq? To “double down” or draw down? To surge in with more or begin to turn the treads for home? The debate is white hot in Washington now.
Just 12 percent of Americans support sending more troops to Iraq, according to [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
The days are short now in Yellowstone National Park. The light, winter clear. The pines, tall. The deep snows, on their way. And soon, in the heart of Yellowstone’s mid-winter grandeur, photographer Tom Murphy will be at his snowy post again.
For a quarter-century now, Murphy has strapped on his [...]

The president will not be rushed, he said this week, on finding a new plan for Iraq. No speech before Christmas. Lots of huddles in Washington. Lots more dead in Baghdad.
There’s talk of a surge in U.S. troop levels, but the Iraqi prime minister is saying “no, thank you,” and the Army’s [...]

American founding father Thomas Jefferson knew a lot about music, architecture, revolution, slaves, philosophy, governing, and wine.
Jefferson was far and away the young nation’s wine-lover-in-chief. He advised sober George Washington on what to drink, kept fabulous wine cellars when the country was still the province of hard cider and whiskey; braved pirates and hurricanes [...]

Extraordinary meetings underway today in China. A third of the US cabinet members, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, plus Fed chief Ben Bernanke and the head of the EPA, all in Beijing.
An unprecedented rollout of American officials urgently seeking economic reform and favors from China.
The so-called U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue is partly to [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
It was a wild year in book publishing: the fake memoir scandal, the OJ scandal, the plagiarism charges when Opal Mehta got kissed. But it was some year for reading, too.
Non-fiction on war and Iraq that made you want to go to the streets, or get under the covers and hide. [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Internet spam is nothing new. But in the last few months, the scourge of e-mail inboxes around the world has exploded, again.
“Call me”, “Hey, Johnny”, “Love Pills”, “Big bucks”, the subject lines are like bad haiku. But the story behind a new breed of superspam, “spam 2.0″, is [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Folks roots singer-songwriter Greg Brown was raised in Iowa, the son of a Pentecostal preacher father and an English-teaching mom who played guitar. He was plucked up early into the music biz, played the folk scene in New York, worked in Portland and Los Angeles, but came back to the Midwest life, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Outgoing UN secretary general Kofi Annan made his swansong in the U.S. yesterday, throwing Harry Truman at George Bush.
From Truman’s presidential library in Independence, Missouri, the UN leader said straight up that the world is in a sorry state, and that the UN needed American support.
“As President Truman said,” quoted Annan, “The responsibility [...]

In April, 1966, the cover of Time magazine asked “Is God Dead?” Well, “no” the answer turned out to be.
Despite centuries of science, the Enlightenment’s resistance to religious dogma, and modernity’s romance with reason, faith has not only survived but made a huge comeback in recent years.
Now a raft of books, some bestsellers, argue [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Stephen Hawking keeps saying it: we’ve got to get off this planet and colonize space if the human race is to survive long-term.
Last week, NASA unveiled its plans for the first colony in space: on the moon. By 2020. Not the moons of Jupiter or Mars, but the good old [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Columnist, novelist and satirist Carl Hiaasen is a Florida boy to the bone, born and raised and risen to fame in the glittering, swampy funk of South Florida.
His bestselling novels, Strip Tease, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, and more, have taken devoted readers deep into the whacked and scuzzy side of the [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
The Iraq Study Group owned this week. The question now is how much more they’ll own, or influence. “Grave and deteriorating” was their ‘wake up and smell the bitter coffee’ phrase on Wednesday. By Thursday, President Bush was already saying “thanks, but no thanks” to their main recommendations: head [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Political activist and women’s movement icon Gloria Steinem came out swinging decades ago as an irresistible voice for feminism and freedom as a new generation defined it.
She was a beauty and a battler. Founded Ms. Magazine when that was an earthquake in publishing. Stood up again and again for women’s rights, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
And now the question: What exactly was it that we, and Washington, and the world heard yesterday when the Baker Commission stood up, tore into US Mideast and war-making policy, and proposed a way out of Iraq?
A too-little-too-late minority report? A shocking public repudiation of a sitting president? A brilliantly [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For months the country waited while Iraq burned and the President said stay the course. Today, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group — five Republicans and five Democrats commissioned by Congress and led by former Secretary of State James Baker and Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton — finally has its say.
The day after Robert [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Hold the deep fry on Broadway and the doughnuts in the Bronx. New York City is banning trans-fats from New York restaurants. The hydrogenated oils that have crackled up millions of fried meals and put the flake in millions of flaky crusts are headed off the menu.
Restaurateurs are up in arms, [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Mohandas Gandhi — the great promoter of human rights and perhaps one of the most influential men of the 20th century — brought independence to India in 1947. His teachings against colonialism, racism and violence informed and inspired Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, and Nelson Mandela and [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Confirmation hearings are on today for President Bush’s pick for the next Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. Gates must now answer tough questions on his plan for Iraq and the Middle East. Americans want U.S. troops home. But they don’t want to leave behind a terrorist haven.
Gates has [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
If ever there was a shared, sacred text in this country, it is the US Constitution. And the people who drafted it –the James Madisons, the Ben Franklins and Thomas Jeffersons– are, for most of us, the high priests of all that has gone right in our history. They were [...]

John Bolton ends his controversial tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. President Bush accepted Bolton’s resignation today.
For perspective, we turn to Carol Giacomo, diplomatic correspondent for Reuters News Service.
Guests:
Carol Giacomo, diplomatic correspondent for Reuters News Service.

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko is reading like a who-done-it fictional thriller. Last month, Litvinenko was poisoned by the radioactive substance Polonium 210. Before he died in London, he named Russia President Vladimir Putin as the culprit — which the Kremlin called absurd.
Meanwhile, traces of polonium have been [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“The Christmas tree was delivered to the White House yesterday,” joked David Letterman this week. And then came the late night punch line: “Just what we need at the White House — more dead wood.” Badda-boom.
American humor has turned more political and edgy than it’s been in years. And [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Never mind snakes on a plane. We had radioactive jetliners this week, in the British spy murder scandal. We had the Pope in Turkey. We had troops in Iraq. We had the president in Amman — and it looked like as close as he could safely get to [...]