Bu Tom Ashbrook.
British literary superstar Martin Amis has been the novelist the English love to hate, to haunt, to ogle.
Son of the famed writer Kingsley Amis - bad boy, playboy and snob in the London tabloids - for Martin Amis, writes The Observer - publication day for a new novel is “a carnivorous and gleeful [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
No one now argues that the war in Iraq has gone well. Far from it. Even the president’s comments are peppered with warnings of failure and nightmare scenario.
But the show-stopper in Washington is what to do… What to do about the worst of scenarios - that now looks all too [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Once upon a time, what Americans knew about themselves came from family and friends, legends and literature. Then came the pollster. Never mind Davy Crockett and Honest Abe and Betsy Ross. Now we had public opinion polls to introduce to the “average” American.
The public ate it up. First, in [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Chinese president Hu Jintao hits the road in Africa today for an eight-nation tour, just the latest in a flood of exchange between China and the world’s poorest continent.
Across Africa today, Chinese crews are building railroads and schools, roads and bridges and hospitals and fiber optics. They’re pulling out mountains of minerals [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Satirist and humorist P.J. O’Rourke is a funny guy from the political right. Acerbic. Edgy. A laugh-out-loud conservative.
In ancient days, he wrote for National Lampoon and Rolling Stone. Now he writes for the Weekly Standard.
In between came books including “Republican Party Reptile,” “Parliament of Whores” and “Give War a [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
The day before President Bush laid out new plans for alternative energy and global warming last week, the CEOs of ten major American corporations laid out a plan of their own for tackling climate change.
These were big guys. CEOs of Alcoa and Caterpillar, General Electric and DuPont. Names traditionally more associated [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Terry McAuliffe has had a front seat in American politics for the last quarter century. The former chairman of the Democratic National Committee is known as a legendary fundraiser with close ties to everyone from President Carter to Tip O’Neill to good pal Bill Clinton.
He kick-started his career in politics right [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
This was an action packed week in the news. President Bush delivered his State of the Union Address. Now, the tough part: selling it to the American people and Congress. The president talked about education, energy, and healthcare but the fog of war looms large.
This week, more suicide bomb attacks [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Hot young black poet Kevin Young was born in Nebraska, raised in Kansas, descended from Louisiana, and now lives in Atlanta and Boston. His poetry - like his life - spans regions, worlds and genres. In “Black Maria” he evoked film noir. In “Jelly Roll” his poetry danced with [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s a question: How do we know when the health care crisis — spiraling costs and millions of uninsured — is really coming to the crunch?
Well, maybe, when it’s getting so bad that our leaders are starting to do something about it. More than a decade after the failed Clinton initiative [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Long ago and not so far away, just a stroll from the opening landmarks of America’s revolution for independence, was born another revolution: the revolution in philosophy and literature of the transcendentalists.
In the middle of the 19th century, in a leafy corner of New England, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Except for the very human part — introducing the Silver Star war hero Tommy Rieman, or the New York subway hero Wesley Autry — it was hard to say if the president’s heart was in the State of the Union speech last night.
Domestic initiatives the White House had telegraphed as bold — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The bloodletting in the American newspaper industry just gets deeper. On your doorstep, if you still get one, you may have noticed your newspaper getting skinny, as ads and readers fly to the web. But newsroom staffs around the country are getting skinny too. So are circulation numbers, and revenues.
Some [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
President Bush moves tonight to a largely domestic agenda in his State of the Union speech, but the state of his presidency is defined more than ever, in the latest polls, by Iraq. His call for a surge in troop strength has not caught fire. Former Republican chair of the [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
From the dawn of time it appears, when the spirit moved them, humans came out of their caves and thatched huts, cathedrals and Latin Quarters, and danced.
With drums and horns and song. For the heck of it. For God. For fun. And when they did, writes the provocative Barbara [...]

by Tom Ashbrook.
First came Katrina. Then the levees failed. Then came the president, with this message… “I believe,” said George Bush, “that the great city of New Orleans will rise again, and be a greater city.”
Today, almost a year and a half after the hurricane, those works echo bitterly across miles of still-desolate New [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Fortune Magazine is out with its annual list of the 100 best American companies to work for. If you don’t work for them, read it and weep.
A few of the perks for the toiling masses at number one-ranked Google? Free gourmet food all the time, all over the company “campus.” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A week of flux in Washington and, maybe, Baghdad. Outcomes - unclear. The president’s urge to surge is getting a cold response on many fronts, but no clear move to stop it yet. House Democrats are celebrating their 100-hour agenda success, but the Senate and White House veto threats [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s no secret now. At the end of this week’s season premiere of Fox TV’s anti-terror action drama “24,” the worst happens. There’s a raid, gunfire, screaming, chaos, a trigger flipped — and a tall, horrifying mushroom cloud rises over Los Angeles. “24″ hero Jack Bauer can’t stop it. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman goes for the big view and the catching phrase. With his global reporting and bracing books — “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, “The Lexus and The Olive Tree” and “The World is Flat” — he has won three Pulitzer Prizes and a raft of devoted readers.
Then [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist, satirist, blogger, and sometime rocker Neal Pollack never put “daddy-hood” at the top of his Gen X priority list. He was a hipster, a late night guy who liked the rough side, a literary player, an author-provocateur, a committed citizen of counter-culture, alternative-culture, and anything but the paycheck mainstream.
Then came [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
And then there was word of an Illinois legislator and Congressional neophyte, just two years in Washington, who turned his attention to the presidency in a time of national crisis. His name was Abraham Lincoln.
Expect to hear a lot about Mr. Lincoln as neophyte Illinois senator Barack Obama makes his newly-minted [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was a big night for “Dream Girls,” “Queen’s” Helen Mirren, and “Borat” at the Golden Globes last night. A big night for the glam, the imperious and the bawdy.
But the future of Hollywood’s product, says New Yorker film critic David Denby, is increasingly not big, but small. Movies shown [...]

Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) took the first step in his presidential bid for 2008. Obama announced on his Web site that he was filing a presidential exploratory committee and said that he would announce more about his plans in his home state of Illinois on February 10.
Jill Zuckman, of the Chicago Tribune, has more [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In 1969, at the height of the country’s anguish over the Vietnam War, just over half of Americans said that war was a mistake, and the streets and campuses and airwaves were full of wild protest.
Now, in January 2007, two-thirds of Americans say they oppose the Iraq War. But the opposition [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt made a sensation not long ago with his slim but feisty little book entitled “On B.S.” — or, actually, on the pungent long form of that phrase. We’re drowning in B.S., said the august philosopher — and the bull-slingers are actually worse than liars, because they don’t [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When Martin Luther King was alive and in the streets, facing police dogs and fire hoses for civil rights, American conservatives generally condemned him as a rabble-rousing law-breaker and trouble-maker.
Today, nearly four decades after Dr. King’s assassination, many conservatives are singing a different tune, claiming King — in many dimensions — as [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The latest intercontinental “it” book out of India hits America this month with the 900-plus pages of Vikram Chandra’s big novel “Sacred Games.” Harper Collins won the US bidding war with a million-dollar advance on a sprawling saga of life and death in the underworld of Mumbai — Bombay. A police [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was the week when the next shoe dropped on Iraq, but lightly, uncertainly. The President spoke. The orders for more troops have been given. But the sound of a rallied nation, even the Republican Party, marching behind the “new plan” was missing.
There were more hats in the ring [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you’re on the upside of the American economy, life is pay stubs and 401K accounts, mortgage, taxes — and if you’re really scoring, yachts and the ski lodge. If you’re on the downside — the real, gritty, ghetto downside — it’s a crazy, hustling, off-the-books, get-it-done world out there.
Millions of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was no “top gun” flight suit this time. No Mission Accomplished banner. No strut. Just an American president, a bit pale, almost pleading with the American people to give him one more chance in a war that has gone on much longer, at much greater cost and with [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
2007 opened with a burst of American women in the spotlight. Oprah - flanked by Mariah Carie, Tina Turner, and Mary J. Blige - ladeling out millions for young girls in Africa, saying “the future is so bright for them it burns my eyes.”
Nancy Pelosi, grandchildren at her side, lifting the gavel as [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
The ooohs and ahhhs were loud and strong in San Francisco on Tuesday as Apple icon Steve Jobs rolled out his company’s latest cool tool, the Apple iPhone.
After rocking the world of computing with the Mac and of music with the iPod, here was Apple’s sleek new must-touch grand entry into the realm [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
We still can’t get over the weather. Flips flops and cut-offs in January. Winter golf in Chicago. Temperatures ten and fifteen degrees above previous record highs, thirty and forty degrees above usual.
In Colorado, they’re using artillery to manage avalanche threat after huge blizzards. In Washington, the cherry blossoms are [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Sometimes you have to step way back to see what’s going on in the world. For centuries, the view from the moon looked something like this: the West on a roll, confident and expansive, the once-proud Islam in retreat, and Asia, out of it.
Today, says French big-thinker Dominique Moisi, it’s [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
In the sweep of history, great cities come and go from their golden heights. Vienna, Florence, Athens — all once crown jewels, now storied and fine but second tier, maybe third.
In the 21st century, a new pack of contenders are jostling for the “hot city” crown. New York and London are [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
If doing for others is the road to happiness, New York’s Wesley Autry, who jumped on to subway tracks to save a man’s life last week, ought to be the happiest guy on the planet these days. But what about the rest of us?
A new science of happiness is attempting to pin [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For two decades now, hip hop has ruled American pop music. To rule in hip hop is to rule the pop culture. The heirs to Quincy Jones are Diddy and Jay-Z. And maybe next, Ryan Leslie, a hitmaker.
His first big pop creation is Cassie, with her hit “Me & [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Talk about a New Year! In the very first week we have an epic turnover to Democrats on Capitol Hill and the first woman Speaker of the House in the nation’s history in Nancy Pelosi. There was a long goodbye to Saddam Hussein, a goodbye to President Ford, and goodbye to [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s a brand new year, 2007, so what is hip? Well, not low-rise jeans, we hear. Abs down to there and muffin-top rears are so over. Hip-hop? Looking a little long in the tooth. Dance music is back. Mini-desserts. The Sopranos, one last time.
In 2007, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
One number says it all when it comes to the giant income and wealth inequality in America today: $210 million dollars. That’s the exit pay package Home Depot announced yesterday for its departing CEO Robert Nardelli, and Nardelli is widely seen as an already highly-paid failure.
210 million more dollars for [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Robert Kagan is a potent conservative thinker who spoke up loud and early for American force to remove Saddam Hussein and championed war with Iraq. He’s a neocon luminary, a sharp analyst of Europe and America, and an emerging historian to boot.
His new history of America’s early centuries argues that even [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been hot sometimes and cold sometimes, but for five-plus years now, Americans have lived in the midst of an economic expansion. The rewards may not have been equally shared, but it beats recession any day.
Now, economists are looking out on the newly-dawned 2007, and asking if the growth train can [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
2007. A brand new year. And maybe time — high time — for some brand new thinking. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, in ways of thinking that lag the world and its changes. A new year is a good time to look at new possibilities, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On the first business day of 2007, Capitol Hill was somber pomp and circumstance this morning, as President Gerald Ford lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda before his National Cathedral funeral.
But on the first business day of the new 110th Congress, on Thursday, the hush is gone and the whirlwind, the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Christopher Houston Carson was five feet four inches tall, slight of build, and — as mountain man pulp fiction hero “Kit” Carson — a giant in America’s 19th century romance with Manifest Destiny.
As Kit Carson set out on the Santa Fe trail in 1826, so was America heading west. As he [...]