By guest host Jane Clayson:
To date, the Iraq War has left more than 25,000 wounded. It’s the first war in which 90 percent of the wounded survive their injuries. But it also means there are more veterans with amputations, brain injuries, and post-traumatic stress disorder returning home than ever before.
A new HBO documentary [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The news did everything but take a vacation this week.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales bowed out. A bathroom sting and now Idaho Senator Larry Craig is fighting for his job. President Bush talked compassion in New Orleans but tough on Iran.
Quarterback Michael Vick plead guilty. A love-struck astronaut plead temporary insanity.
Fred Thompson [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
If you want to grow up to be rich and famous, turn up the heat. Celebrity chefs are white-hot.
Emeril, Rachael, and Alton are cooking up more than Louisiana garlic bread, 30-minute meals, and the science of sandwich making.
They’re rolling in dough, baking in big bucks with TV shows, best-selling books, personalized [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Mother Teresa, the diminutive nun who devoted her life to the sick and dying in the slums of Calcutta, is expected to be declared a saint later this year by the Vatican, a mere ten years after her death.
She was one of the world’s great examples of how deep faith can [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
We all - some more than others - do it: the Freudian slips, the malapropisms, and spoonerisms, the ums and the uhs.
You say: “I caked a bake” and your friends laugh. President Bush “misunderestimates” and Senator John Kerry has it out for the “Wasabi Muslim Fundamentalists.”
But why do we misspeak and [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
In the race for ‘08, strong and smart women and one ex-President are a force on the campaigns. The compliant spouse, neatly coiffed and smiling in the background, is a thing of the past.
The candidates’ spouses are giving their own speeches and playing the politics, but moreover, they are making [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Mothers and fathers, your heads have got to be spinning.
You’ve been told your children will grow up emotionally empty drug addicts or worse if you don’t get on the floor with them and play with their trucks dolls and trains. That they won’t grow up smart or competitive enough [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
U.S. politicians have been up in arms recently about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Everyone agrees he needs to hurry up and make progress. And some, like Senators Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton, say he’s ineffective and should go.
But there are questions about whether it’s still America’s role to recommend regime [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Brands like Gucci and Prada and Louis Vuitton carry price tags that would eat up most people’s monthly paychecks. The ads tell you luxury-grade goods are worth it but what if it’s all a big lie?
Behind those Italian labels, those claims of Old World craftsmanship, is just a lot of [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales brings a sudden end to a long legal soap opera.
Gonzales has been President Bush’s most trusted legal advisor since their days in Texas. But in the end, he was marred in accusations of purging disloyal U.S. Attorneys, and perjuring himself before Congress.
Critics said it [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
On the far side of death, nobody knows what happens. Everyone has an opinion, or a belief. But what about the near side of death — the moments in which we die, the minutes in which we are first dead? Could science reach into that near terrain?
For thousands of years, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Floods and heat this week in the Midwest. The space shuttle back on Earth. Wall Street calmed for the moment. And the big guns coming out on Iraq.
Top Democrats and Republicans call for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki to step down. Maliki fires back that he can [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Americans’ impressions of the Amish tend to run hard and fast to stereotypes: wholesome horse-and-buggy barn-raisers or holier-than-thou cult of the past that cheats with chainsaws when you’re not looking.
The beards and bonnets and old-fashioned ways are endlessly alluring, and confusing. Is this the simple life that would save the planet [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ninety percent of the cocaine in the U.S. comes in through Mexico, most of our imported marijuana, and tons of methamphetamines. That flow has created giant drug cartels and a drug war in Mexico: murders, kidnappings, beheadings, police station shoot-ups.
Now, that drug war is coming across the border, too — into [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We’re in the height of hurricane season now, August to October, and that’s not news to Jamaica or Mexico’s Yucatan, where Hurricane Dean has been tearing up the coast in recent days.
Mexico got lucky with Dean. It was the third most powerful hurricane to make landfall since 1850. The damage [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Lesson number one out of the disaster at Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine: take too much out of a mountain, or out in the wrong way, and the mountain comes down. And the deeper you are in your search for coal, the more mountain there is to fall.
With coal prices high [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When Roy Berkowitz-Shelton was 50, he told his wife he was a woman — and probably always had been. Not in any way you could immediately see, but deep inside — a woman in a man’s body.
Now, the marriage is effectively over. Roy is “Deborah” — Dr. Deborah Bershel. Her [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
2006 was a very big year for Democrats, taking back Congress, spiking the dream of the permanent Republican majority.
2008 could be even bigger for the Dems. The war in Iraq is so unpopular. The White House looks within their grasp, and so does a bigger majority on the Hill.
But what vision [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A hundred and fifty years ago this year, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision that many scholars see as the worst in its history.
The Dred Scott decision of 1857 found that all “negroes,” even the free, and all their descendants, were not due the status of “citizen.” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”, 1957: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.”
“On the Road” became the Bible of the Beat [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s supposed to be the dog days of summer, but news keeps popping out all over.
Global stock markets have been on a wild ride and the Fed intervenes. The Utah mine goes from bad to worse, as rescuers die. There was a big earthquake in Peru. More poison toys from China. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Thirty years ago today, Elvis Presley died at Graceland, a drugged and bloated mess. Fifty years ago this year - young and wild - the gyrating electric Elvis was at the top of his game, astonishing the country.
In between was a career that crossed racial lines, launched rock and roll, thrilled [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the summer of 2007, high profile killings in Newark and Oakland and Connecticut have put bloody murder back in the headlines.
But here’s the rub with crime and punishment in America. Crime peaked in 1992 in this country, while prison populations have continued to explode.
The United States now has the highest [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
From the dawn of the industrial age, at least, cities have been seen as a menace to human health. Crowded, dirty, dangerous; centers of industrial waste and crime. Health, and the healthy life, were elsewhere: in tidy suburbs and the rosy-cheeked, pastoral countryside.
But recently, all that folk wisdom is being challenged. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the reality of the race for the GOP’s ‘08 presidential nomination. Mitt Romney won the Iowa straw poll but still draws just 13 percent in national polls. McCain is on the ropes. Fred Thompson is still undeclared, and falling. And Rudy Giuliani is way out front.
And the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For much of history, marriage was, in many ways, a group undertaking. Communities demanded a certain kind of relationship and supported a certain kind of relationship, even when those were very different from today’s.
Now, marriage is what people make of it, and couples are often very much on their own. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
One month from now, General David Patraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, will be sitting in Washington reporting on the impact of the US troop surge. But the debate over what difference the surge has made and what to do going forward is already white hot.
Michael O’Hanlon and Anthony Cordesman, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The big word in the lead headline in the Wall Street Journal today: crisis. The markets have been on fire for weeks now, and not in a good direction. Nobody knows what’s coming next.
But suddenly there’s harsh, bright light on where we’ve just been. Too much lending, too [...]

President Bush’s long time political advisor and man dubbed “the architect” — Karl Rove — is resigning. He helped Bush win the White House — twice.
He’s the mastermind behind years of Republican rule but also the man who predicted a “permanent Republican majority.” That’s already gone in Congress.
Karl Rove has been loved and feared [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
As far as we know, Jane Austen lived a quiet life, two hundred and more years ago, in an England that had just lost the American colonies.
But you would never know it by the Austen hoopla gushing out of Hollywood and Bollywood and the BBC and bookstores these days.
Jane Austen is hot. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ok, it’s August. It’s summertime. And the livin’ is… well, not entirely easy. Not this week.
Wall Street is all over the place, and way too much down for investors’ liking. Utah coal miners are still buried in the earth. Baghdad’s government is looking creaky. The presidential [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is a self-described full-on liberal who worries a lot about community in America.
He made his name in the 1990s with his finding that hordes of Americans were, in his famous phrase, “bowling alone” — living without the traditional community ties of bowling leagues and Moose clubs that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Joe Biden of Delaware has served in the US Senate through seven presidencies and three wars. He was there as the Vietnam War wrapped, there for the Iran hostage crisis, for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, for the Gulf War, for Bill Clinton, for Ronald Reagan.
Now [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was a quirky story in the US news media, and a national triumph in Moscow.
Last Thursday, in the frigid wake of a nuclear powered ice-breaker, Russia sent two mini-submarines 13,000 feet beneath the Arctic ice cap, and planted a titanium-encased Russian flag on the seabed of the North Pole.
“The Arctic,” declared [...]

The Minneapolis bridge disaster has opened up big questions about aging infrastructure. We’ll look at America’s rusty skeleton, and what it will really take to fix it.
Guests:
Rudolph Penner, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Public Policy at the Urban Institute
Larry Roth, deputy executive director of the American [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On a cool Tuesday night, last night, in San Francisco, Barry Lamar Bonds stepped to the plate, under the lights, before a sellout crowd of Giants fans, took an 86 mile per hour fastball from Washington Nationals pitcher Mike Bacsik, knocked the ball over the right field wall and stepped into baseball [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist and digital world icon William Gibson made his name writing darkly gleaming science fiction. The future he described was a dystopia saturated with technology, disembodied digital lives, and a menacing undertow of fear.
A lot like 2007. After 9.11, says Gibson, the future ended up on the windshield of the present.
Now, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When American voters ended a dozen years of Republican dominance on Capitol Hill last November, the dramatic turnover came with charged expectations of the new Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress: on war and presidential powers, ethics, immigration, and health care, and much more.
Democrats were out of the wilderness and back [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Market volatility is the nice way of putting it. By the end of last week, the Dow Jones industrial average had lost 800 points in the big summer sell-off of 2007, and the ride isn’t over.
After years of lining the pockets of the hedge fund rich with the IOUs of the subprime [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Back when America’s streets were still mostly paved with dirt, a few hardy entrepreneurs strung together the first transcontinental thoroughfare and called it the Lincoln Highway.
In the century that’s followed, commerce, car culture and interstate highways mushroomed around it. But believe it or not, most of it is still here today, [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The news didn’t take a vacation this week–not by a long shot.
In Minnesota a bridge collapses at the height of rush hour. The tragedy triggers concerns about the state of the nation’s infrastructure. Chief Justice John Roberts suffers a seizure.
In Washington, lawmakers roll up their sleeves and get it done on [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
This has been the summer of discontent. Airline delays are at record highs.
One in four domestic flights delayed. Thousands of flights cancelled outright. Horror stories of passengers stranded on the tarmac for hours. Vacations ruined. Important business meetings missed. Flights oversold. Near misses in the air.
Tempers are flaring at [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
In war time, the story we hear is that of the soldiers on the battlefront, deployment after deployment, coping with debilitating injuries at home.
But behind these stories are the unsung women of the war — the wives who hold the families together while their soldiers are gone. They’re left on [...]

By Jane Clayson.
Sixty-two years ago, America dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people.
The bombs ended the war. Americans celebrated victory.
In Japan, hundreds of thousands of survivors - many severely wounded, both physically and mentally - tried to rebuild their charred lives.
Six decades later, Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki talked to [...]

By Jane Clayson.
Rupert Murdoch takes the helm at The Wall Street Journal.
It is a shocking statement of fact for those in the media business.
Murdoch, the press baron and crusading, take-no-prisoners tycoon, now has his hands on the world’s premiere business publication.
His reputation through Fox News and his media empire is well known. He’s been lampooned [...]