It’s autumn — football season. And in towns across America, that means big games, halftime, and marching bands.
These days, in many towns and schools, the marching band can be as big a deal as the team. At the Rose Bowl and the Macy’s Parade, they dazzle. But they dazzle too on Friday nights, under the [...]

Protests all over this week: on UAW picket lines outside GM plants while a lightning strike lasted; in New York against Iran’s president; in Washington and Europe against George Bush’s greenhouse gas plans; and in Myanmar, with bloodied monks in the streets and a government crackdown.
Democrat presidential contenders debated again as Hillary seemed to cement [...]

War by war, icon by icon, public television documentarian Ken Burns is putting his trademark video stamp on American history.
With his colossally popular renderings of the Civil War and baseball, Mark Twain and jazz, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark and more, Burns — often with collaborator Lynn Novick — is shaping our collective memory of [...]

The big GM wobble this week over workers and wages and whether its factories will be built in this country was just one more wake-up call. The old world is gone and the new one is going to require a lot more innovation if America is going to stay at the top of the economic [...]

In the world of jazz, saxophone giant John Coltrane was so big, so powerful, so deep, so out there that almost half a century later jazz musicians are still wailing in his shadow.
Coltrane, says New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff, was the John Henry of jazz, the John Wayne, the Paul Bunyon — the [...]

In the neoconservative camp that pushed for war with Iraq, Norman Podhoretz is a great patriarch, one of the old originals. But he’s hardly out to pasture. He’s a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani. He counsels George W. Bush in the White House.
And here’s what he’s saying. We are in the midst of World War [...]

The last time the United Auto Workers went on strike nationally against GM, back in 1970, most Americans alive today had not been born. And that’s not all that’s changed.
The UAW had 400,000 members on strike then. Yesterday, it was a shadow of that — 73,000 — who walked off the job. In 1970, GM [...]

After warnings of a possible crackdown from Myanmar’s military junta, thousands of monks and other protestors continued to march, demanding an apology for the beating and arrest of monks in a protest several weeks ago, and the rollback of steep fuel price increases.
Guests:
Simon Montlake, East Asia correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York has turned into a doozy. The city where Fidel Castro called JFK “ignorant,” Yasser Arafat packed a pistol on his hip, and Nikita Khrushchev banged the UN podium with his shoe, has gone after Ahmadinejad with a vengeance.
“Bearded blowhard” said the New York Post. “Petty, cruel dictator” [...]

It was young men, big money, high-risk and do-or-die, lightning-speed action — and we’re not talking hedge fund traders here. When America was young and the earth’s seas were teeming, the big juicy score, the fast money, was in whaling.
Adventurous risk-takers with their eyes on the golden prize set out on the high seas with [...]

Death and taxes are the two sure things, they say. In the last week, the storm’s been brewing on the tax front. Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan re-emerged to say he never meant to sanction all of George W. Bush’s big tax cuts and the GOP-led spending that rolled right on.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told [...]

What is it about vampires? Halloween is still five weeks away, and already the fake fangy teeth are in the drug store aisles, along with the little kits for applying trickles of blood.
Some ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages cannot seem to get enough of the neck-nuzzling, blood-sucking world of Dracula. Book publishers [...]

It’s been a week of arresting confrontations and odd run-ins. In Baghdad, the Iraqi government wants Blackwater’s burly security men out. In Jena, Louisiana, thousands marched charging racial injustice after nooses and a beating.
Alan Greenspan disses George Bush on spending and taxes. A major Democratic campaign contributor confesses fraud. Israel’s airstrike on Syria is said [...]

Whether you grew up in temple, or church, or the church of rock-and-roll or reggae, you know the Bible’s Book of Psalms. “By the rivers of Babylon.” “Sing a new song.” “Out of the mouths of babes.” “The valley of the shadow of death.”
The Psalms are the song and poetry of the Bible. Poetry of [...]

Iraq has the world’s third largest proven reserves of oil, and they’re barely tapped. This week, the price of oil reached $82 dollars a barrel — the highest in history. And Alan Greenspan says in his new memoir that, at least for him, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was “largely about oil.”
Iraq’s ocean of oil [...]

It’s a hot new TV show about young Americans straining to launch their lives in an uncertain time. And it’s not premiering on TV. The new show, called “Quarterlife,” will premier this fall on the Web. The Internet. Not on the big screen in the family room, but the little ones, all over.
TV and television-style [...]

It was a travesty: crude, privileged white-boy lacrosse players at Duke, raping a black woman for kicks. And then it was a different travesty: innocent young men railroaded by a politically-ambitious prosecutor, and a public too willing to believe.
Race and class stereotypes turned on their heads and unleashed with a vengeance. A media machine and [...]

Twenty years ago, Chicago’s Allan Bloom made a bestselling splash with his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that American universities had walked away from the Western classics and dumbed down American higher education.
Now, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman arrives to say that door is nearly shut. In his new book, [...]

Hillary Clinton got run over by health care reform politics fourteen years ago. Trounced by drug companies and insurers, by Harry and Louise, by ordinary Americans afraid she would limit their health care choices.
Now, years have passed, nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured, millions more live in fear of losing coverage — and Hillary is [...]

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat has astonished readers for more than a decade with the lucid clarity of her prose. In “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” “The Farming of Bones,” “Krik? Krak!” and “The Dew Breaker” she took Americans to her native Haiti and Haitians to America with stunning power.
Now, Danticat is out with a memoir, “Brother, I’m [...]

Americans overwhelmingly say they oppose the war in Iraq, but the war in Iraq goes on.
So, where’s the antiwar movement?
Well, it’s all over — and nowhere. It’s in Congress, among Democrats and some Republicans. It was in the streets of Washington, D.C. this weekend, with a few thousand protestors chanting and marching. It was in [...]

Aiden is up. Tiffany is down. Liam, Alejandro, Braedon and Jack are white hot for boys. Addison, Sawyer, Shiloh and Ava for girls. And watch out for baby Memphis.
The names we give our children say a lot about cultural hopes and dreams and history. And also, increasingly, about fads and feelings and the TV show [...]

After all the months and troops and anticipation and charts and testimony, the bottom line of this big week on Iraq may come down to this: a giant handoff of the war by the sitting president who started it to whoever his successor may be.
In his testimony this week, General Petraeus said “progress.” Ambassador Crocker [...]

Nellie McKay is an act like no other these days. She’s a ball of Cole Porter and Doris Day and Bette Midler and Eminem. Some critics get excited and throw Liberace in there. And Elivis Costello. And Peggy Lee.
She’s witty, she’s angry, she’s funny — she’s one of a kind. And she’s with us today, [...]

It’s been a long time in the wilderness. But the “Made in the USA” label is packing some cachet again. After poison toys from China, job losses, and eco-disaster images of filthy smokestacks abroad, Americans are getting the itch to buy American again: toys, bikes, even t-shirts.
Some never lost the urge. But in the age [...]

Son of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, Junot Diaz made a huge splash a decade ago with a tough, vivid collection of short stories on Latino ghetto life called “Drown.” Now, Diaz is back with a debut novel that is knocking the socks off critics.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” tracks one heart-torn [...]

Conservative legal hot shot Jack Goldsmith was tapped for a key job in the Bush Justice Department in part because of his “get tough” reputation on terror.
But within hours of getting inside as head of the Office of Legal Counsel — the office that sets legal boundaries for the presidency — this conservative top gun [...]

Later this week, the President will address the nation with his onward vision for the U.S. military in Iraq. With a hard war in its fifth year, benchmarks unmet, and polls showing American disillusionment, it will not be an easy sell.
But the way is being paved before Congress this week in the testimony of General [...]

The stated goal of the U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq was to create breathing room for political reconciliation in Baghdad. That has not happened.
But reporting to Congress this week, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are pushing for patience — a pullback, next year, of the surge, but an open-ended U.S. military commitment in [...]

For millions of Americans in love with a little fictional corner of Minnesota, Saturday night is Prairie Home Companion night, and Garrison Keillor is the man who keeps the lamplight burning.
An old-fashioned master of storytelling and the radio review, who plucks at mystic chords of memory until Powdermilk Biscuits and the Chatterbox Cafe pop out. [...]

Six years tomorrow. Six years since 9/11.
It’s getting to be a long time. Maybe now it’s time to look at where we’ve been. If Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation in one direction, 9/11 galvanized it in many. Pro-war, anti-war, right, left, and scattered center.
Politicians and pundits have analyzed how and why. Now the psychologists are [...]

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been a week of build-up and delivery.
There was delivery by actor/senator Fred Thompson, who finally made it official on Jay Leno that he’s really, truly, officially — yes — running for president.
There was build-up all over Washington in anticipation of next week’s progress report on Iraq by General David Petraeus. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Luciano Pavarotti, the most widely popular singer in opera history, is dead at 71.
The son of a baker and a cigarette maker, he was a joyful, exuberant tenor heard by millions — many of whom may never have paid attention to opera before.
He was the glorious “King of the High C,” and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you thought the subprime mortgage mess was behind us, think again. In the next year, another two million adjustable-rate mortgages are scheduled to reset from low “teaser” rates to household budget-busting new highs.
Foreclosure rates are already soaring. In some regions, whole neighborhoods risk going under. A credit crunch [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the long-ago fall of 1969, something completely different in television began happening in the UK. It was called Monty Python’s Flying Circus — a free-form, satirical, anarchic circus of humor that had Britons staring dumbfounded, then laughing ’til they cried.
Monty Python made the leap to America, and then onto the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A-list scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are out with a new book that has sparked furious denunciation. It’s called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” It says the deep U.S. embrace of Israel is no longer in America’s national interest, but goes on anyway because of a sprawling, well-funded, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says the US tradition of democratic capitalism has gone badly wrong. A generation of free market adulation, says Reich, has built a kind of capitalism so powerful that it is overwhelming the democracy it is supposed to support.
He calls it “supercapitalism.” A capitalism that brings us [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
So, Alberto Gonzalez is out, but Congress is back — and so are the questions about the executive privilege that the Bush White House has asserted with such extraordinary determination.
At the heart of that asserted privilege and power is secrecy. Secrecy about wiretapping, about torture, about politics and the Justice Department, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The soaring voices of The Indigo Girls took the world by storm in 1989 with a debut album that went double platinum on the strength of its big hit “Closer to Fine” and its brilliant harmonies.
But the duo behind the album, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, go back much further — to [...]

By Tom Ashbrook.
Political activist and women’s movement icon Gloria Steinem came out swinging decades ago as an irresistible voice for feminism and freedom as a new generation defined it.
She was a beauty and a battler. Founded Ms. Magazine when that was an earthquake in publishing. Stood up again and again for women’s rights, [...]