By Tom Ashbrook
The first time Greta Binford really paid attention to spiders was in a Peruvian rainforest where hundreds of thousands of spiders worked together to weave webs as big as semi-trailer trucks. The young biologist — part Indiana Jones, part Spider Woman — never looked back.
She’s now tracked spiders all over the world. [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
The human papilloma virus is the most common sexually transmitted disease. A new study out yesterday finds more than a third of American women are infected before they are 24. Some HPV strains lead to cervical cancer, and cervical cancer can kill. But when Texas governor Rick Perry recently mandated [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
British playwright Michael Frayn made a huge splash on Broadway with his show “Copenhagen,” a mind-gripping drama about a World War II meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Nazi atomic chief Werner Heisenberg. Now, the actor who played Heisenberg on screen, Daniel Craig, is off playing James Bond. And Michael Frayn [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
Imagine you’re the reporter. In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport. Surrounded by hundreds of components for making deadly roadside bombs. The US military has laid them out for your inspection. And the whole exercise is pointing the finger of blame at Iran.
It’s the third time in two [...]

It’s snowing up and down mainland America’s east coast today, and in Chicago, the airport’s been socked in. But way out mid-Pacific, in the balmy Hawaiian islands, snow is not a factor. It’s sunshine and waterfalls and a whole lot of tropical history.
We ditch the snow and head there today; in the sound of the [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
John Edwards grew up in a Carolina milltown, made a killing as a trial attorney, lost a son, won a US Senate seat, ran for president (and came closer than you might recall in the Democratic primaries), and ran on the ‘04 White House ticket with John Kerry — all before he was [...]

The Oscars are this Sunday, and the competition for Best Picture remains as wide open as it has been in years.
It’s a mystery which way Academy voters will go, as all of the “Big Five” films seem to have a chance. Will it be “Babel,” “The Departed,” “Letters from Iwo Jima,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” or [...]

In the news this week: a whole lot of yin and yang.
Tony Blair says he’s bringing some troops home from Iraq at the same time Prince Harry readies to deploy.
Tehran ignores another USN deadline. The US and allies ready for a showdown.
On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lock horns in a battle [...]

Never has the phrase “the buck stops here” had so much relevance. Thanks to the boundary-pusher that is technology, the days of cash may soon be no more. The future is called electronic money, and soon millions of people will be paying for their purchases not with dollars and cents, but key chains and mobile [...]

Nigeria is rich with oil, producing more than Iraq and Kuwait combined. The country is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States. And it’s “light sweet crude,” …a dreamy kind of oil that needs little refinement.
But, the communities closest to the drills and platforms — the people of the Niger Delta — live [...]

Daniel Tammet’s mind works in extraordinary ways. He can calculate huge sums in his head in moments.
He came to fame a few years ago when he recited pi to the 22,514th digit without skipping a beat. He speaks 10 languages. Learn Islandic and Lithuanian in a week? No problem.
Daniel Tammet has a rare form [...]

Iraqis working and studying in America live with the gnawing fear that their friends and family could be the next victims. They know every cell phone call could bring bad news.
It’s an expatriate life of frequent nightmares and frantic emails each time the media reports another bombing.
Iraqis know firsthand the pain and anxiety of living [...]

It’s that stage in life somewhere between what we once were and what many try to hold on to - sometimes desperately. Futilely.
It’s the point where choices narrow into thin slivers of possibilities. The passage from middle age into that later, often unspoken stage.
Author Sara Davidson hit the panic button in her late [...]

Writer Sara Davidson on lost love, no sex and other middle-age dilemmas. And she answers the question: “What Will We do with the rest of our lives?”
Guests:
Sara Davidson, author of “Leap! What WIll We Do wioth the Rest of Our Lives?”

Lately, it’s easy to assume that Al Qaeda is hardly what it was.
That since its massive attack on September 11th it’s been beleaguered, aching for solid leadership, and struggling wildly to regroup.
And - in tandem with the war on terror - in the geopolitical background.
But new reports suggest otherwise - that Al Qaeda is back.
This [...]

We’ll talk with the Afghanistan Ambassador to the United States, Said Jawad about the current threats to his country’s peace and security.
Guests:
Afghanistan Ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad

By guest host Jane Clayson.
“Green building” is becoming increasingly popular in home and commercial building construction. Buildings in this country are energy hogs, consuming more energy than cars and trucks by a two to one margin.
Many Americans associate “green construction” with higher prices and inconvenience. But the cost of environmentally-friendly technology — such as energy-efficient [...]

The United States is immersed more deeply than ever in the Muslim world’s sectarian divide. A five-part series explores the split between Shia and Sunnis, from its origins shortly after the death of Muhammed in the seventh century to the modern-day upheaval in Iraq.
We talk with NPR reporter Mike Shusterabout Islam’s Sunni-Shia split and how [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Eighty-five percent of American parents believe it’s important to tell their kids they’re smart. And 85 percent of American parents may be wrong.
In recent years, the self-esteem movement born in the 1960s has run into some serious opposition when it comes to scholars who think about raising kids.
You think telling young sons [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Winston Churchill famously said “jaw jaw” is better than “war war” - that talking is better than fighting. This week, Americans had both. Debate on the Hill. War in Iraq.
And there were other notable pairings. A negotiated breakthrough with North Korea that left Pyongyang, for now, with nuclear bombs. [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
When it came to explaining the vast cosmos to Americans, there was no one like superstar astronomer and great communicator of science, Carl Sagan.
He reminded us of the “billions and billions” of mysteries that surround us. In books and lectures and on TV, he asked the really big questions.
Carol Sagan died, too [...]

A heated debate, partisan debate over Bush’s war policy in Iraq began yesterday in the House. Democrats warned against the escalation. Republicans spoke of the risks of withdrawal.
Guests:
Jack Beatty, On Point News Analyst and a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly

By Tom Ashbrook.
If there was one thing we thought we knew about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when they took over the White House, it was this: these guys knew oil.
Bush grew up in the Texas oil patch and oil business. Cheney headed Halliburton, the oil services giant. These, we were [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
In Washington this morning, President Bush holding his first news conference of the new year. The president will address hot issues: Iraq, North Korea, and more.
There appears to be good news on North Korea, with negotiators in Beijing reporting they have hammered out an agreement to supply energy to Pyongyang in return [...]

Love, don’t spoil. New findings say too much praise may be a problem for our kids.
Guests:
TBD

A heated debate, partisan debate over Bush’s war policy in Iraq began yesterday in the House. Democrats warned against the escalation. Republicans spoke of the risks of withdrawal.
Guests:
Jack Beatty, On Point News Analyst and a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly

By Tom Ashbrook
Two months ago, Berkeley, California became the first community in the country to regulate business that make or use nanoparticles. Nano is a minute unit of measure: a billionth of a meter, the tiniest element of the material world.
The nanotech industry is the molecular-level revolution that many are hoping will one day [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Mexico’s raging drug war came to Acapulco last week. Gunmen disguised as soldiers stormed two police stations with automatic weapons and video cameras.
They killed seven police and staff - and taped the whole thing. The Acapulco killings were just one more deadly skirmish in a suddenly white hot war between Mexico’s [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Former Massachusetts governor, Republican Mitt Romney formally throws his hat in the ring for the presidency today.
Romney comes to the contest as successful businessman, state leader, increasingly conservative politician who saved the 2002 Winter Olympics - and as a Mormon.
He’s hardly the first Mormon political leader - or presidential candidate. Orin Hatch [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
On a main street in Amsterdam in late 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim assailant outraged by Van Gogh’s film depicting Islamic oppression of women.
A death-threat letter left stabbed to his chest was addressed to the woman who is my guest today: the Somali-born, Muslim-raised critic of Islam, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
Senator Barak Obama reached for history on Saturday, standing in Springfield, Illinois, quoting Abraham Lincoln’s “house divided” speech as he formally announced his candidacy for the US presidency. The tableau was super-deliberate: The home turf of the Great Emancipator of Civil War and slavery days as launch pad for the highest-flying [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff lays it down rough, in the gonzo journalism tradition of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac.
He’s crossed the desert with Mexican immigrants, worked in cannery and hog factory, gone deep with New York fireman after 9.11.
Now, Charlie LeDuff brings us the stories of a year on the road, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
It has been a week when the grand could barely deliver, and the strangely gripping stories came from left field.
In the chambers of the U.S. Senate, Republicans and Democrats debated who was less at grips with the Iraq War.
The president’s giant budget landed with a promise of balanced federal books by 2012 that [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
It started with Bill Clinton, when “reinventing” government and “downsizing” the federal payroll became flagship “New Democrat” causes. It exploded under George W. Bush, when big government Republicans in love with the private sector ran Washington.
And now, your government, the work of the American public, at its most sensitive and core functions, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Six American helicopters now down in three weeks in Iraq. Twenty-seven Ameircans dead, falling from the sky. The latest, yesterday, a big twin-rotor Marine “Sea Knight” transport helicopter crashing in a field northwest of Baghdad, in billowing flames and smoke.
In a war of many fronts and factors, with a largely street-level [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
In the 1990’s, when China’s fabled Shaolin Temple was celebrating its 1500th anniversary as a center of Zen Buddhism and kung fu, American college student Matthew Polly was on a pilgrimage of his own.
The skinny kid from Topeka, Kansas who had grown up on Star Wars and David Carradine was leaving Princeton University [...]

By Tom Ashbrook
The loose nuclear material story that emerged last month was a chiller. Fifty-year-old Russian smuggler Oleg Khinsagov was supposedly a trader in fish and sausages. But when the Georgian secret service arrested him, they found in his jacket pocket, casually wrapped in plastic, 100 grams of enriched uranium - weapons grade.
Back [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
In the breakout Hollywood hit “The Devil Wears Prada,” actress Meryl Streep plays an icy, larger-than-life tyrant of the fashion publishing industry - imperious, sadistic and - in her world - incredibly powerful.
But you don’t have to go to the movies to find the model for that powerhouse. Everyone knows it’s Anna [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
If you’re looking for hot button issues in the world today, Israel and anti-Semitism are as hot as they come.
Here’s the latest twist: a new uproar, with Jews charging Jews with anti-Semitism over Israel. American Jewish defenders of Israel charging progressive Jewish critics with fueling anti-Semitism - and being themselves anti-Semitic. And [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
As always, the contest behind the contest last night at the Super Bowl was all about the ads. Half-naked men swarming a Chevy. Heavy breathing over Doritos in the check-out line. Kevin Federline shoveling french fries for Nationwide Insurance.
But the ad and marketing game is spilling way beyond TV ads [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
American forces are neck deep in the war in Iraq, but in recent weeks an awful lot of the tough talk out of the Bush administration has been about the much bigger country next door, Iran.
And it’s not just talk. A second U.S. aircraft carrier is headed to the Persian Gulf. [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Here’s a news flash: the debate over whether or not to eat meat, to eat the creatures that share the planet with us, did not start in the organic granola aisle of your local health food store.
For centuries and more, those who could eat meat have argued about whether humans should eat meat.
They’ve [...]

By 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 go [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Iconic American novelist Norman Mailer turned 84 this week. That may be hard to believe for generations of Americans who came to know him as the hell-raising, to-the-ramparts literary giant of the American century.
From World War II to the heart of Vietnam and well beyond, in the years when the novel was [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
For a while last fall, with the Republican “thumping” in the November election, vice-president Dick Cheney seemed back in the bunker. The most powerful vice-president in the history of the republic looked sidelined.
But in the last few weeks, as tensions have risen over Iraq strategy and the White House has looked almost [...]