By host Tom Ashbrook:
We all know the story, delivered in grade school textbooks across the country, of how the universe began. The Big Bang. Fourteen billion years ago. Space and time and everything, exploding into being in a flash, and still exploding as celestial bodies race apart across the cosmos.
Well, maybe so. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Fifty years ago, marriage and divorce rates in America were roughly equal among all classes and races. Not anymore. Not even close. When headlines this month announced divorce rates were down to their lowest point in decades that was true, sort of.
They’re down for the college-educated and affluent. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
At the end of a too-short and turbulent life, iconic French singer Edith Piaf sang “no regrets” with all her big French heart. She was four feet eight inches tall, with a driving voice that captured the tragedy and longing and beauty of a hard century.
Born on the mean streets of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Way down in the deep blue sea, even at the planet’s frigid poles, there is much more life than you might think. Astonishingly rich biodiversity, say deep-sea mariners just back with the latest research.
Carnivorous sponges. Ultra-deep crustaceans. A red octopus with wings on its head. More biodiversity than the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been a long and winding road for women in the American workplace. First, they were frozen out or locked in the steno pool. Then came “liberation” with its open doors and glass ceilings. Then, a crisis of confidence over whether work and child-rearing could really co-exist.
Now, the new [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the heart of Baghdad’s Green Zone, US and Iranian diplomats posed for the cameras yesterday. It was the biggest break in nearly three decades in the deep freeze between Washington and Tehran. But what it means is still anybody’s guess.
This month, US warships were war-gaming off the coast of [...]

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:
You don’t get higher-profile than the celebrity portraits of photographer Annie Leibovitz. From the covers of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair to the Hollywood heights, she has famously photographed Demi Moore nude and very pregnant, John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono, Michael Jordan looking godlike, and Jack Nicholson putting in his [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On Monday, Memorial Day, the rituals of war and remembrance will unfold again — lilacs in the air, gunfire salutes, and praise for dead soldiers.
Loss in war is never easy. But the war that Iraq has become makes it doubly hard. Public support, among Republicans and Democrats, has never been [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Victory in Iraq may be hard to picture, but victory was at hand for George W. Bush in Washington this week, as Democrats folded on their demand for troops withdrawal deadlines and gave the president the money to go on funding the war — until September.
On immigration, there was fury and outrage [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ok. Let’s take our lumps first: as a nation, the headlines and health reports scream at us — we are fat, chubby, tubby, obese, double-wide, love-handled, heavyweight snack-masters. And we don’t like it.
Consumer Reports says 90 million Americans are dieting right now, with an average goal of losing 37 [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Monica Goodling didn’t look like a storm trooper before the House Judiciary Committee. Didn’t speak like one either, in her whispery opening responses.
But the 33-year-old former counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and liason to the White House finally said it straight up yesterday: she “crossed the line” in playing politics [...]

Guests:
Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor and legal analyst for Slate
David Iglesias, fired US Attorney from New Mexico
Mark Tushnet, law professor at Georgetown University

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was 1967, the Summer of Love, and the Beatles were making cultural revolution. Three years earlier, they were the Fab Four rocking the USA on the Ed Sullivan Show. Three years later, they would be finished, disbanded.
But on June 2, 1967 — forty years ago next week — they released [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For a nation of immigrants, America has always had a complicated relationship with immigration. Some came in splendor, some came in chains, and everything in between.
In the half century since Ellis Island closed, immigration and the immigrant experience have changed massively, again. Do we still want to absorb? Do [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The baby boomers made a lot of babies. And now, they’re all grown up — or nearly — and hitting the American workplace in waves. Twenty-somethings with iPods and attitude, ready to take on the world as they see it.
The early line on Generation Y? Ambitious, demanding, questioning everything, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You’ve got to hand it to her. Hillary Clinton does not quit. She toughed out the rough end of her husband’s presidency, and dived in herself to become a popular and respected US Senator from New York.
Now, she’s built a campaign like few others in history - with its huge [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Paul Wolfowitz no-fault divorce with the World Bank is behind us, but the epidemic of non-accountability in American government rolls on. From the highest offices in the land, when fiasco erupts lately, we are grudgingly, belatedly told “mistakes were made.” As if by gremlins, maybe, but not “me”!
The ducking and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
First it was pet food in Canada and the US with Chinese ingredients killing thousands of cats and dogs. Then came reports of toothpaste in Panama with Chinese ingredients killing people.
Now, we learn that just last month, food from China bound for the US included dried apples preserved with cancer causing [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Americans get married every day of the year, but right now we are headed into the heart of wedding season and the wedding business — and what a business it is.
White tents and tall cakes are months in the making and budgets head over the moon. Bride and groom dream of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
What a whirlwind week in the news it has been. Private money buys Chrysler. A huge search is on for captured US soldiers in Iraq. Jerry Falwell goes to his reward. And then it gets bigger.
The commander in chief names a “war czar.” The president’s man, Paul Wolfowitz, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
With televangelist Jerry Falwell’s death this week, the story of his Moral Majority crusade has been very much in the news again.
British historian Ben Wilson, has been looking at the moral majority movement of another era — from the licentious, libertine, anything goes Britain of the wild 18th century to the mother [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Business Week magazine loves to write about American winners, about brilliant business strategies and American companies taking on the world.
This week, Business Week’s cover story has a little different flavor. Its headline is “The Poverty Business,” and it’s all about American companies zealously targeting America’s working poor as a new profit [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We know Hollywood loves sequels, but this summer is almost beyond belief. Thirteen rampaging retreads are lined up to storm into the multiplex.
Almost everything old is new again: Spiderman 3. Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Shrek 3. Ocean’s 13. Harry Potter is back. Fantatstic Four - ditto.
Daddy Day [...]

Television evangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell has died. His influence extended from the pulpit to politics. We’ll look back at his extraordinary life and legacy.
Guests:
Reverend Father Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of “First Things”

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Paul Wolfowitz was the intellectual star of the neo-conservative crew that drove the country to war with Iraq. Today, he’s the World Bank president who used his position to land his girlfriend a sweetheart job and cast a global pall over his own anti-corruption drive at the bank.
Today is judgment day, [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
When the Republican party was riding high, through the Republican Revolution of the 90s and the White House entry of George W. Bush, success covered fault lines.
Now, the GOP is in trouble, and some big Republican names are talking about why. Very big names, like the heirs of Barry Goldwater, Dwight Eisenhower [...]

More than three thousand four hundred American soldiers have now died in Iraq. Thousands of young men and women sacrificed. Thousands of families that know the pain.
Retired Lt. Col. Andrew Bacevich is a Vietnam and Gulf War veteran, a West Point grad and professor at Boston University, where On Point is produced. [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
We don’t know their names. Three American soldiers were taken in an ambush in which four comrades died, early Saturday morning in Iraq’s so-called “Triangle of Death,” south of Baghdad.
Today, thousands of troops are searching door-to-door, in palm groves and back alleys, in mosques and water tanks.
The US military says an Al Qaeda [...]

It seems like five minutes after the college acceptance letter that the first bill arrives. For many American families and students, handling the cost of college is a huge struggle, where every penny counts.
Which makes the scandal over student loans still growing in Washington and around the country particularly galling.
Giant lenders getting jacked-up interest [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
He’s raised more money than any other contender for the GOP presidential nomination, and still Mitt Romney trails John McCain and Rudy Giuliani by a fair piece in the national polls.
But with both McCain and Giuliani carrying baggage of their own, the Mormon ex-governor of Massachusetts is still very much in the race.
He’s [...]

Guests:

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Christopher Hitchens has never been a friend to religion. The sharp-tongued British-born critic and provocateur called Mother Theresa “the Ghoul of Calcutta.” He was early and loud in denouncing “Islamic fascism.” He’s a dukes-up-on-all-fronts anti-theist.
With his new book, the gloves are really off. He’s called it: “god is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We’ve got fires and twisters and jihadis in New Jersey this week. Wildfires in LA and Catalina, the monster tornado in Kansas, the pizza-delivering half dozen who were ready, were told, to storm Fort Dix for Allah.
In Washington, moderate Republicans tell the President his credibility on Iraq is shot. In Baghdad, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In her years as a high-profile science writer, Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Angier has written about polar bears, cheetahs, lions, tigers and pit vipers. She’s written about the science of empathy, altruism, why women’s shoes don’t fit, why we laugh, why we cry, testosterone, love, and interstellar space travel.
Now, Natalie Angier [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Maybe Americans just do it differently. Republican members of Congress sat down with George W. Bush in the White House this week and told him that he must get results in Iraq, or get out.
But when you look at how Israel has now taken stock of its disastrous campaign in Lebanon [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Huck Finn’s pap was never an angel. In Mark Twain’s famous telling, he had a bad drinking problem and a cross of nails in the heel of his boot. He locked Huck in a Mississippi river cabin and beat him hard, so hard that Huck took off.
Now, novelist Jon Clinch has [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When it comes to jobs for new college graduates, the Class of ‘07 is in fat city. Plenty of jobs, say reports from all over, with freshly-minted engineers grabbing fifty and sixty thousand dollar starting pay.
But beyond the job market, it’s a wild world new grads face out there — war, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist, essayist, poet and all-around London super-critic Clive James has been a fixture of Britain’s cultural thrust and parry for decades. Now he’s out with a warning for the world, at least the Western world.
We are forgetting the sources and champions of the humanism which, says James, is the West’s greatest strength. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the mid-’90s, when Bill Clinton looked to reform American health care, American business swung in with a vengeance to help kill the initiative. Now, with health care costs threatening to swamp major corporations, some big business is singing a different tune.
In California, Fortune 500 business leaders are shouting “crisis” and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, self-styled “America’s Mayor” after the attacks of 9/11, will not be out-gunned on the national toughness front.
At South Carolina’s conservative military academy The Citadel over the weekend, Giuliani said he wants to boost the size of the US Army even more than President Bush.
And on that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Economic growth may be off in the US. But it’s not bothering Wall Street. Almost every day last week — four days in a row — the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a brand new, all-time, record high.
The week’s close, at 13,264, is “over the moon” territory for the Dow [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For years now they’ve called mega-millionaire entrepreneur Russell Simmons the CEO of hip hop, and it doesn’t take a finance major to see why.
Def Jam Records is his baby. So were Run DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Ludacris, Def Comedy, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy’s comeback, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
John McCain says he’s ready to go to the “gates of hell” to track down Bin Laden. Rudy Giuliani said it’s OK to keep Roe v. Wade and OK to dump it, and abortion. Mormon Mitt Romney said Americans don’t vote on a man’s church. Three of ten GOP [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There are good bosses, and then there are bad bosses. Not just bad, says business humorist Stanley Bing, but crazy bad — “Crazy Bosses,” as the Fortune magazine columnist calls his new book.
They come in many flavors, he says. The Bully. The Paranoid. The Narcissist. The Wimp. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Bill Gates and Eli Broad — mega-billionaires and business legends — are shouting now that America must fix its education system or fail in global competition.
The heat is on. No Child Left Behind only goes so far. Now, some Democrats are turning their eyes on teachers. It’s time to [...]