By guest host Jane Clayson:
When it comes to tales of addiction, it’s the high-profile stories we hear of starlets flitting in and out of rehab as though it’s a weekend retreat.
Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears have made headlines for seeking treatment. Robert Downey, Jr. has gone in four times; Daniel Baldwin, nine.
Critics charge their [...]

Guests:
Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist and bestselling author
Seth Jones, political scientist and counter-terrorism authority at the Rand Corporation
Evan Kohlmann, consultant on international terrorism

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Fresh U.S. intelligence has put all eyes on the northwest provinces of Pakistan as the hot zone for al Qaeda terrorists. The timing couldn’t be worse.
America’s key ally, Pakistan’s moderate President Pervez Musharraf, has sent troops to the area along the Afghanistan border, but his country is in crisis with escalating [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Think about the English people, and you might think of stereotypical traits: a cool reserve; a sense of irony; a love of gardens and pubs; a stiff upper lip.
But British cultural critic A.A. Gill has one word for all that Englishness: rubbish. The English are, above all, an angry people, full [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
In the suburbs of Washington and all around the country today, there’s a small army of civilian and military experts and soldiers who did their time in Iraq and are now back, brooding, ashamed and angry.
They are angry about how badly wrong their mission went, about how they might have done [...]

James Hand hails from the small town heart of Texas and he has been singing and playing his way through dance halls, salons and jute joints for about four decades now.
He began at age 12 and now at 55 he is just out with a national debut album.
His music is catapulting out of Texas, across [...]

It has been the kind of week to make people hot under the collar.
Senator Chuck Schumer accused U.S. Attorney General Albert Gonzales of lying; Lieutenant General Ray Odierno said militant networks in Iraq are getting weapons and training from Iran; the Dow took a plunge; and White House aides are held in contempt of [...]

Fresh off the big final blackout of the Sopranos finales, writer and producer Matthew Weiner is on to smokier pastures with his new show “Mad Men.” It’s a stylish, smart-talking look at the golden days of advertising: the sexist world of Madison Avenue circa 1960, where self-assured ad men brag that they invent reality [...]

Entrepreneur Steve Barr is on a mission to replace the worst public school in Los Angeles with charter schools. Barr has got an army of supporters behind him, from union organizers to teachers unions, from LA’s mayor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Barr has got brass knuckles, and with ten schools up and [...]

For Stephen Carter the plot thickens again.
The Yale Law School professor-turned-novelist struck gold with his debut novel “The Emperor of Ocean Park” - a searing murder mystery that took readers inside the world of black America’s upper crust.
This summer, Carter’s turning up the heat again with his new thriller “New England White.” The plot and [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Declining birth rates in the Western world may tip the balance of power to the East. A top intelligence advisor says the economy, international security, even the United State’s stature, are all on the line. And it’s because we are not having enough children.
But a leading economist disagrees: [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Doctors are driven by a passion to save lives but their earliest training ground is a roomful of death. It’s the human anatomy lab where cadavers are the constant companions of these students of medicine.
Into this hidden realm comes a 28-year-old poet who yearns to be a doctor. [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Last night, the presidential debate took a high-tech turn as YouTube videos of fiery citizens were put right in the face of candidates. Lots of talk-back from average Joes and Jills to the likes of Barack, Hillary and John.
All of it was against the backdrop of a campaign that has become [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Times have changed and so have the anchors. But a lot has stayed the same. Revenues still add up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A white male anchor still dominates the rating.
But there are some differences. CBS put a woman behind the anchor desk–a very expensive one by [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Federal funding for abstinence education is on the rise: a proposed $191 million dollars for 2008, up $28 million from 2007. But recent studies are raising questions, finding no difference in sexual activity between kids with abstinence education and those without.
Proponents of abstinence say the studies are not reflective of the [...]

Guests:

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ten years ago, J.K. Rowling was a 30-year-old single mom living on welfare in a chilly one-bedroom flat in Edinburgh, and no one had heard of Harry Potter.
Ten years and 325 million copies later, the Harry Potter series is a legend and J.K. Rowling is a billionaire, richer than the Queen of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Wait until September, the country was told again and again. Wait until September to hear about the surge and Iraq.
Wait until September to hear from the generals. It was all September … until yesterday. Now, it’s November, we’re told, before any real conclusions can be drawn on the war.
Senate Democrats, pushing [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Martin Sexton is the self-taught singer-songwriter out of Syracuse, who made his chops playing for change on the streets of Boston and is now filling halls from the Roseland Ballroom in New York to The Fillmore in San Francisco.
Sexton’s got a big voice and a big heart and a big sense of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When “No Child Left Behind” became the law of the land for American public schools in 2001, George W. Bush was riding high and the idea of holding schools accountable for student performance won overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.
Now, after five years of testing and, often, teaching to the test, the whole [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Akiko Busch was facing milestones and loss and change. She walked down to the nearest river and jumped in, and swam across. And just kept swimming across American rivers — the Hudson, the Delaware, the Monongahela, the Susquehanna, the Mississippi, and more.
She just keeps swimming, for herself, her peace of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The bottom line of the big new intelligence report on current terror threats to the United States is not one you likely wished for.
Nearly six years after 9.11, the country is said to be facing a “persistent and evolving” terrorist threat that has regrouped and rebuilt and refocused on attacking the US. [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
The Spanish Civil War was Europe’s grim curtain raiser on the horrors-to-come of World War II. It was Ernest Hemmingway’s bloody backdrop to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”.
The Soviets backed Spain’s leftist government. Nazi Germany backed the rightwing backlash and dictator-in-waiting Francisco Franco.
So did the Roman Catholic Church.
Half a million or [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Celebrity worship is in our blood, maybe in our genes. Even chimpanzees love to gaze at photos of the most powerful and dominant chimps in their social group.
But the American obsession with celebrity seems to have hit new highs recently. Paris Hilton in jail, Lindsay Lohan in rehab, Nicole Ritchie, whatever.
With [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
A century ago, on the south side of Chicago, there was a bordello like none the country had ever seen. It was called the Everleigh Club, and it was more grand, more gilded, and more palatial than many a palace.
Inside, the rich and powerful and well-placed men of Chicago society consorted with [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
It is Farm Bill time again in Washington.
And once again, American farms and waistlines and economics and trade are all on the line. If you are what you eat, the massive bill being cooked up in Congress right now is fundamental.
It decides what we grow. Its enormous farm subsidies help determine [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s a callout to American fans of Indian food. After you’ve enjoyed your samosa and chicken tikka masala, and maybe a curry and some goolab jam, Chitrita Banerji wants you to know there’s a much bigger world out there.
A universe barely touched on most Indian menus in America of rich and varied [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There were desperate hours this week for the Iraq war effort. A president with all-time low popularity insisted the war can be won, and Congress should keep its hands off. The House voted in rebuke, just hours later, to require withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq by April.
We got [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you want to know what the huge pop singer Pink thinks, you don’t even have to ask. It’s right there in her lyrics — “You don’t want to mess with me.”
And not just in Pink’s lyrics, but all over the world of female pop these days: tough, in your face, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In Britain, it’s commonplace — security cameras, surveillance cameras, everywhere. Some now even shout at you if you misbehave. The average Londoner is caught on maybe 300 surveillance cameras a day.
Now the bug is catching in the USA. Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia are all getting camera-ed up. Thousands of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For much of the 20th century, tough lines were drawn around the world between capitalist and Communist countries and economies.
Now, Communism is all but gone, and some economists are saying it’s time to draw new lines between kinds of capitalism, between “good capitalism” and “bad capitalism” — good capitalism as in open, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Twelve billion dollars a month are being spent now on the Iraq war, and lots of blood, too. It is THE topic on Capitol Hill right now, with a giant defense spending bill on the table.
The President said again yesterday in Cleveland, OH that he’s hanging in. But Democratic Senators [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Jim Carrey did it in his film “Liar, Liar.” Tell the truth, exactly what you think, no matter how impolite, all the time. It got him in a heap of trouble, but that was just the movies.
Brad Blanton does it in real life. And thinks you should too. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
After a six-day siege at the fabled Red Mosque, Pakistani troops stormed in today, guns blazing, Islamic militants fighting and falling - in the heart of Pakistan’s capital city.
From the US, it can look like just one more bloody day in a bloody part of the world. But Pakistan is different. [...]

Guests:
Sam Roberts, Metro Reporter, The New York Times
Kelly Musick, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California
Janice R. Levine, psychologist and marriage therapist
Paul Amato, Professor of Sociology, Demography & Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Once upon a time they called it the “seven year itch” — the swoon from marital bliss to marital danger zone. Now, they’re saying three, three short years from wedding bells to bumpy road.
Seven years is still the median length of first marriages that end in divorce. But new research [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Right behind the big three Republican presidential candidates in Iowa polls stands a man who ought to fill the bill for GOP conservatives.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is famous for losing 110 pounds before jumping into the presidential race.
He’s an ordained Baptist preacher who’s a little tired of being asked about evolution [...]

By guest host Linda Douglass:
No matter how bad the international reputation of a dictatorship, there’s a Washington lobbying firm willing to take up the cause, says Harper’s Ken Silverstein.
Silverstein went undercover for his article this month and found that more than one organization was willing to whitewash Turkmenistan’s record of abuse and raise its profile [...]

By guest host Linda Douglass:
This holiday week, the world’s been hard at work. In Washington, President Bush stares down his critics and commutes Scooter Libby’s sentence. In Great Britain, shocking news that doctors are prime suspects in the bomb plots.
Out on the campaign trail, Bill barnstorms for Hillary to mixed results. Obama’s dollars soar [...]

By guest host Linda Douglass:
While polio may seem like a relic of the past, for some, the disease’s aftermath is very much alive. Writer and childhood polio survivor Susan Richards Shreve has written about it in her new memoir “Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven.”
Shreve was paralyzed as a [...]

By guest host Linda Douglass:
No Democratic political consultant has been more important, famous or infamous than Bob Shrum. He’s done it all: eight presidential campaigns, from George McGovern’s run in 1972, to the battles of Al Gore and John Kerry.
Though he’s had dozens of Senate and State House victories, he’s had no White House winners. [...]

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 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:
How thirsty is America for bottled water? Pretty darned thirsty. Every week of the year we now move a billion bottles of water from ground to gullet in ships and trains and trucks. That’s the equivalent of almost 38,000 eighteen-wheelers full of water every week.
Sixteen billion dollars a year [...]

President Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s 30-month prison sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak case.
Guests:
Michael Isikoff is investigative correspondent for Newsweek.

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Last week in the firestorm debate on immigration reform, even conservative stalwarts finally blinked at the full-blast power of rightwing talk radio. “Talk radio,” said Mississippi’s Senator Trent Lott, “is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”
Problem? Not the way fans of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity [...]