Two and a half thousand years ago, a man named Herodotus wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war between the Greeks and Persians that had shaped his times.
He gathered wild tales of fabulous creatures and arrogant kings and queens. He also heard of the very real clash of the armies [...]

The travel posters from Kenya are all “Out of Africa” beauty, safari paradise shots and handsome Masai tribesmen with their red robes and spears. And for decades, Kenya was held up as East Africa’s great hope for democracy and development.
But in the last month, after a disputed — observers say stolen — presidential election, the [...]

From the misty, half-attuned, still-in-the-American-Century shores of the United States, China and India can look like peas in a pod: two rising Asian giants with screaming growth rates and lots of what used to be American jobs.
Look closer, and these are very different cats. China is the factory floor and India the back-office, software shop. [...]

Never count a determined man out. John McCain was down for the count last summer. Broke and written off and flying coach. Now he’s taken Florida, and the Republican race to Super Tuesday has a whole new complexion.
Giuliani is headed for the sidelines. Mike Huckabee hanging in, maybe for a VP seat with Florida’s winner. [...]

The issue of women and power is very much in the news. But look beyond Hillary Clinton’s push for the White House, and only two percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 1000 are women. Two percent — forty years after women stood up for liberation.
Nina DiSesa has grabbed and wielded corporate power. She’s been [...]

The day after President Bush’s final State of the Union address, it’s hard not to think about this man’s legacy.
With grinding wars underway and the economy in trouble, the Republicans who would succeed Bush in the White House barely mention his name.
But they do talk about Ronald Reagan — almost ceaselessly. There was a time [...]

It’s not new but it’s truer than ever — more and more young American couples are waiting later and later to start a family and have their first baby.
Fifty-two percent of college graduate first-time mothers are now thirty or older — not just out of high school, not just out of college, but well into [...]

A week from tomorrow, coast to coast, and with everything on the line, the biggest day of presidential primary voting in American history will take place. On Super Tuesday, February 5th, nearly two dozen states are in play — and big ones.
The Democrats are thundering for the big day. Barack Obama is fresh off a [...]

Of the world’s seven thousand languages nearly half will disappear by the end of this century. Their extinction means the end of entire cultures, traditions, and histories.
K. Davis Harrison and Gregory Anderson are on a mission to save these dying languages. They’re linguists, but not the kind who spend their lives in libraries and classrooms.
They [...]

If you were off planet the past few days and returned to Wall Street this morning, you might be forgiven for thinking that all was well this week. The market tanked just a few days ago but by yesterday it had all but recovered.
So what happened? That’s among the big stories under our microscope today.
Also, [...]

Snowy Chicago may not leap to mind as a great center of Mexican-American life and culture, but it is. A million sons and daughters of Mexico live in the Windy City.
At the heart of that community is a musical sensation called Sones de Mexico — six musicians, fifty instruments, and a big world of music.
Their [...]

Bill Clinton started out low-key in Hillary Clinton’s campaign — but no more. As Hillary and Barack Obama have gone to the mat in the heat of the primaries, the former President Clinton is all over this race — up to his elbows in the fight, throwing real punches.
Obama’s Iraq message? A “fairy tale.” A [...]

In their new movie, “The Bucket List,” when Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman’s characters get the news that they’re going to die, and soon, they set out to do it all — skydive, climb Everest, see the Pyramids, travel the world.
When high school chemistry teacher Bryan Cranston is given six months to live in AMC’s [...]

In the world’s hyper-ventilating global stock markets, the bleeding has slowed, for the moment.
After two days of outright panic on markets in Bombay and Hong Kong and across Europe, the US Federal Reserve Bank jammed through a huge rate cut. President Bush and Henry Paulson and Congressional leaders hustled to a big photo op, talked [...]

As stock markets around Asia and the world headed south today, India’s finance minister tried to calm the selling: “Look,” he said, “India’s economy is headed for a booming 9 percent growth this year.” So he hopes.
And what will Indians spend that plenty on? India’s industrial giant Tata hopes they will soon be spending it [...]

In the glare of presidential campaign lights and stock market bonfires, it’s almost possible for the war in Iraq to disappear.
But not if you’re a soldier, or an Iraqi, or cutting the checks in Washington, or feeling the strain at the Pentagon.
Iraq’s Defense Minister says U.S. troops will be needed for another decade. John McCain [...]

Martin Luther King Day has a little more heat on it this year than some. From the cauldron of presidential politics has spun the question: who mattered more in the earth-moving civil rights revolution of the 1960’s — Martin Luther King, or Lyndon Baines Johnson?
The preacher or the president? Crazy question, say those who were [...]

“Faith doesn’t just influence me,” Mike Huckabee told evangelicals last week. “It defines me.” And then he lost in South Carolina to John McCain.
In Nevada, labor lined up for Barack Obama, then Clinton took the vote. And Latinos carved their own way over political and color lines.
These are big players, speaking for the first time [...]

We’re looking at the amazing story through history of the American stomach and the extremes of consumption and digestion.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guest:
Frederick Kaufman, author of the new book “A Short History of the American Stomach.” He’s a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and wrote the article “Wasteland: A Journey Through the American Cloaca” for the February issue.

Mitt Romney’s Michigan gold. An economic stimulus package brews in Washington. And cloned meat is cleared for the supermarket. Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
Guests:
David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, has been advisor to four U.S. presidents.
Ellen Goodman, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated [...]

Mike Huckabee may not believe in evolution, but Neil Shubin does. He’s been there and seen it in the fossil record of hundreds of millions of years, from the Arctic to rural Pennsylvania.
Now the University of Chicago paleontologist wants to introduce you to the ancestors: worms and reptiles, and, above all, the fish whose prehistoric [...]

In case you missed it, here’s the wealth of nations news on planet Earth: the biggest banks in America — the crown jewels of U.S. financial power — are being bailed out by foreigners. Billion after billion is being pumped in from China and Singapore, Kuwait and Korea and Dubai.
American bankers made a killing in [...]

Novelist Sue Miller gets very intimate, very quickly, and stays there. Her best-sellers have captivated readers since “The Good Mother.” Now, she’s pushing into the complex heart of marriage and, in this election year, political marriage — one of the most fraught kinds.
“The Senator’s Wife” is a novel that goes at the deep compromises that [...]

So, Michigan has spoken — to Republicans at least — and the word is Romney.
Mitt Romney needed it bad. And he got it. Michiganders went for the man who promised their jobs back, and not John McCain, who said some were gone for good.
But this Republican race is still a free-for-all. Next stop South Carolina, [...]

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a field marshall in the Republican Revolution. Former senator Gary Hart was a Democratic contender for the presidency.
Now, they’re both saying the country is facing a crisis — and needs a radically new politics that blasts through partisan lines.
Gingrich is still conservative, but says Republicans have failed [...]

What a backslide. In the thick of one of the most exciting, boundary-breaking presidential campaigns in history, with a woman and an African-American out front in the Democratic Party, suddenly it sounds like a junior race war out there.
Candidates and surrogates are lobbing taunts and jibes. Bull Connor and LBJ are back from the pages [...]

Lizzie Gottlieb’s brother Nicky was never like most other kids. Very smart, but talked late, walked late, didn’t make eye contact, didn’t socially connect.
It wasn’t until he was 20 that Nicky was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a kind of high-functioning neurological cousin of autism that is being diagnosed in more and more young Americans.
They can [...]

There was an amazing intergenerational moment on air last week, as former NBC TV news anchor Tom Brokaw faced cable talker Chris Matthews in the egg-on-the-face aftermath of the media’s New Hampshire miscall.
Clinton had won, not Obama as predicted, and Brokaw suggested that just maybe America’s political pundits were going to have to cool their [...]

Behold, the humble banana. It’s not as simple as you think. Its tree is not a tree. Its fruit is a giant berry — in fact, it’s the world’s largest herb.
The banana is the planet’s biggest fruit crop, but most can’t reproduce without human intervention. Until 1876, almost no one in North America had ever [...]

It’s been a week for the political history books in the U.S., and a late stab at history in the Middle East.
New Hampshire voters had their say — and left the pollsters speechless. Now it’s a free-for-all: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, McCain; Romney, Thompson, Huckabee, “Rudy” — all still in this race.
Bush promises peace in the [...]

Freedom of speech is enshrined right there in the American Bill of Rights, but Americans took a long time to really embrace it. By 1798, President John Adams was already blowing by the First Amendment to go after supporters of Thomas Jefferson.
More than a century later, in World War I, Americans were sentenced to 20 [...]

OK, here’s the blue economy scenario for 2008. Housing prices keep falling. Credit stays tight. Consumers choke. In retailing, restaurants, travel and more, jobs vanish. In real estate, construction and banking, investment seizes up. Money retreats. Growth is gone. And we’ve got a recession on our hands.
For months, economists have debated whether it’s here already. [...]

Lucky you, if you rode the red-hot Chinese stock market over the last few years. Between 2003 and last fall, the Shanghai index was up 300 percent. Domestic A shares were up 500 percent in two years. We’re talking epochal money here.
Now, with money pros wondering if it’s about to go bust, super-investor Jim Rogers [...]

Hey, stop the presses. New Hampshire has written its own headline. Upset! Comeback! It’s Clinton over Obama — never mind Iowa and the polls and the magic. It’s McCain over Romney — never mind, again, the money of the man who was governor right next door.
Hillary Clinton never quit and nearly cried and pulled it [...]

New Hampshire was supposed to be a firewall for the Hillary Clinton campaign — the primary stronghold where she would anchor her drive for the White House. Instead, it’s primary day and New Hampshire is a major challenge.
The other kid from Chicago, Barack Obama, has a solid lead in opinion polls. John Edwards is nipping [...]

Iowa got the first caucuses, but New Hampshire holds the first primary. Today, on a beautiful day in the snowy Granite State, the pressure is on and the stakes are huge for both Republican and Democratic presidential contenders.
Hillary Clinton emoted yesterday as polls showed Barack Obama in the lead. John McCain looks strong as Mitt [...]

New York Times investigative reporter David Cay Johnston is mad as hell, and he doesn’t want you to take it anymore. Last time out, the high-dudgeon Pulitzer Prize winner was up in arms about the American tax system.
This time he’s on fire about the whole system. It’s been rigged, he’s shouting, for the rich. And [...]

Only four days after the first votes, in Iowa, of Election ‘08, and one day before the New Hampshire primaries, Americans are in the thick of one of the most amazing political seasons in years.
But one thing’s been missing: the late-night laughs. Leno and Letterman sneaked back on last week. Tonight, Jon Stewart and Stephen [...]

How do you take opera and make it fresh and thrilling again for a 21st century-audience raised on hip hop, iPods, and the movies?
Well, if you’re Peter Gelb, head of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, you start by blasting right out of the opera hall, bringing in a dozen swooping cameras, beaming live, high-definition [...]

Wow. This may not be the presidential campaign year many people expected.
Iowa has said its piece. And Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have swept their parties’ first election year contests. Not the big-money Romney or the big name Clinton but an inspiring young African American Illinois senator, and an Arkansas governor and longtime Baptist preacher [...]

It is Caucus Day in Iowa — the first formal vote of Election ‘08 and the long race for the White House. If the Democrats’ complicated caucus procedure looks like a square dance, the Republicans’ is pretty straightforward — show up; vote.
But the GOP contest this year has been anything but a straight shot. Mitt [...]

And so at last, it’s all about Iowa, at least tonight, as Iowa voters line up in party caucuses for the first real votes of the ‘08 presidential campaign. In an extraordinary wide-open election season, candidates have thrown horse shoes and flipped burgers, cocked shotguns and kissed babies.
Now, Iowa stands to deliver a first verdict.
We [...]

Six weeks ago today was a big day for me. I’d had a little tightness in the chest, a little trip to the doctor. And six weeks ago they threw me on a hospital gurney, slapped on the oxygen mask, and cut my chest open for heart bypass surgery.
I was lucky. No heart attack. No [...]

And so it begins. At long last, the presidential candidates are in the starting gates in snowy Iowa and New Hampshire. But the first big votes of Election ‘08, this week and next, may decide… nothing.
Democrats could essentially tie! Republicans could fight all the way to the convention floor in September.
For the first time in [...]

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 [...]

Southern-raised humorist Roy Blount Jr. took the midnight train out of Georgia a long time ago, to make a life well north of the Mason-Dixon line.
But you cannot take the South out of the Southern boy, and definitely not out of Blount’s lifetime of humorous essays and exasperation over America’s North-South incomprehension.
In a new collection, [...]