The human mind is a fool for order, says physicist Leonard Mladinow. We love order, crave order, and will see order even where there is, in fact, mainly chaos.
The random looms huge in world affairs, he says, but we don’t want to hear about it. We’re blind to it. And it leads us to all [...]

Scott McClellan stole the headlines this week. He’s not the first White House spokesman to write a tell-all. But for George Bush’s press secretary to blast a “culture of deception” right in his book title was pretty rich.
“Propaganda,” writes McClellan. “Botched.” “Illusion.” “Humiliation.” Oh my.
In the Democrats’ world, it’s decision time over Florida and Michigan [...]

The saga of the horse in America is a stunner and a heartbreaker.
Here, in the mists of pre-history, millions of years ago. Gone, over the Bering Strait to the rest of the world, and to extinction here in the Ice Age.
Back, terrified and terrifying, on the ships of Columbus and Cortez — then embraced by [...]

Robotic Mars exploration has been no picnic. Half of all Mars missions have ended in failure. But right now, the Mars Phoenix Lander is up there, well-landed, sending back astonishing images, and — it appears — shaking off its problems extending the eight-foot arm that will dig for ice.
The Phoenix is looking for conditions that [...]

Philip Glass has been called America’s most famous living composer of classical music.
He’s brought his entrancing scores to collaborations with David Bowie and Twyla Tharp, Doris Lessing and Yo-Yo Ma. His operas have brought new music to the stories of Einstein, Gandhi and Robert E. Lee.
Now, at 71, Philip Glass has a new love, a [...]

In 2004, author Paul Roberts came out with his book “The End of Oil,” and we’ve all seen oil’s path since then.
Now Roberts is out with a kind of follow-up: “The End of Food.” It could make a person want to hoard tuna.
Not that oil or food are literally vanishing anytime soon. But Roberts argues [...]

On the journey of American assimilation, to have your culture’s ticket punched on Broadway seems almost mandatory. Whether it’s “Fiddler on the Roof” or “Raisin in the Sun,” the Broadway embrace is a milestone.
The hottest ticket on Broadway right now may mark that moment for Latino Americans. The rap-salsa-merengue extravaganza “In the Heights” is up [...]

Joanna Connors was thirty years old and married when she was raped by a stranger on an empty stage in Cleveland in 1984.
She went on to raise a family and build a career as a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now, almost a quarter century later, Joanna Connors has written the biggest story of [...]

Susan Batson has been called the “Oscar coach.” She takes big Hollywood actors and makes them better. Nicole Kidman thanked her from the winner’s circle as she waved her Oscar. Tom Cruise thanked her as he clutched a Golden Globe. And that’s just a start.
Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez and Juliette Binoche are all on [...]

Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring the sacrifices of American military men and women in war. On this Memorial Day, there is no shortage of sacrifice to consider.
In wars since 9/11, thousands have died. More than 400 in Afghanistan. More than 4,080 now in Iraq.
In March this year, when the U.S. military’s [...]

It’s officially summertime today, and we all want a dip in the pool. But which pool?
In their heyday, at their best, America’s public swimming pools were cool, blue pleasure zones where happy kids and adults of all stripes showered down and splashed in. But just as often, they were cultural battlegrounds — over unwashed immigrants, [...]

For most Americans, the sacrifices made by service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are — after all these years — still out of sight and far away.
For colleagues, for comrades in arms, those sacrifices are as close as a man’s last breath. A woman’s last word.
Memorial Day honors sacrifice across many generations. But [...]

If you want to see into the future, what we just had was a week full of glimpses.
Oil, above all, shattering record after record. Airlines now charging by the bag for luggage, and much more change to come.
On the campaign trail, running-mate talk heating up as McCain, Clinton and Obama race for the White House.
In [...]

Alfred Hitchcock was for years the master of movie suspense. But fifty years ago — May, 1958 — he brought out a film so weird that filmgoers didn’t know what to make of it.
It was called “Vertigo.” It had Jimmy Stewart as a San Francisco detective afraid of heights, on the trail of icy blond [...]

Suddenly, even for people who don’t follow oil futures and Saudi production estimates, the lid seems to have blown off energy prices.
Oil is at double its price of a year ago and still soaring. Some now predict $200 dollars a barrel. Many Americans remember when it was twenty.
Gasoline is heading over the four-dollar-a-gallon mark. Some [...]

The April 3rd raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch in West Texas made big headlines. Texas authorities stormed the polygamist sect ranch, and scooped up more than 460 children after a caller claimed she was a 16-year-old girl being sexually abused there by a 49-year-old “spiritual husband.”
Officials soon announced that 31 of 53 girls [...]

In the New Deal era, the Democrats owned the white working class. In the Civil Rights era, they lost them. Not all, of course, but enough to give Republicans win after big win.
This year, with economic challenges front and center again, the math could change. But in West Virginia and North Carolina, in Kentucky and [...]

Jill Price has a memory like few others in the world. She’s 42 years old, and she remembers everything.
Every instant of her life, and the life around her, since she was fourteen. Down to the smallest detail. Like a movie that never stops running. Whether she likes it or not. And not just what happened, [...]

For much of the country, it felt like a bolt from the blue. Last week, giant California gave a green light to gay marriage.
California’s high court, in a 4-3 ruling, said civil union rights were not enough. Gay Californians — and those from anywhere else who barrel west to the Golden State — are entitled, [...]

Nan Mooney is thirtysomething, well-educated, the child of baby boomers who herself grew up with all the accoutrements of what was very recently thought to be a regular middle-class American life. Nothing fancy, but the full basics: a nice little home with steady income, housing, health insurance, and a summer vacation somewhere.
Now, Nan Mooney and [...]

Myanmar and the world’s responsibility to protect the desperate.

David Pettee always loved family history. But there was a lot he did not know. His old New England family talked plenty of Pilgrims and Puritans. They did not talk about slaves in the family. Or slave traders.
But when Pettee really opened the books, there they were — and more. A torched village. Rum for [...]

Pity the Burmese — and the Chinese earthquake victims — this week. Nature struck both, but one government couldn’t, wouldn’t, help its own people.
At home, California gives a green light to gay marriage. West Virginia goes for Clinton. John Edwards goes for Obama. John McCain says he didn’t mean one hundred years in Iraq. He [...]

Donald Ray Pollock grew up in a town called Knockemstiff, Ohio. Now he’s out with a debut collection of short stories called “Knockemstiff” that makes Lake Wobegon look like a candy-apple dream.
Here is a ragged, dark, downside vision of American small town life, where runaways and drunks set the tone and the smell through an [...]

The images out of China are heartbreaking. Whole villages essentially flattened by Monday’s powerful earthquake in mountainous Sichuan province. Schools down. Hospitals down. Grieving families standing in the rain.
And now, news of dams at risk of bursting. Maybe 20,000 dead. Maybe many more.
Beijing has responded with a hundred thousand soldiers and a national call for [...]

The Paskowitz family was maybe literally like no other.
Nine kids plus mom and dad living in a 24-foot camper. Never going to school. Raised on the beaches of California, Mexico, and Hawaii with surfing as their be all and end all, and the sea as their teacher.
If you’ve ever dreamed of taking your family, your [...]

Hillary Clinton won in a romp in West Virginia, and says she will go on. Barack Obama’s camp points to the Democratic primary numbers and says he’s got it sewn up.
Meanwhile, John McCain just keeps campaigning.
Nationally, Republicans face some daunting realities and poll numbers heading toward November. But few deny John McCain’s got a real [...]

The world loves its iPods, iPhones, TiVo, OnStar, XBox and Blackberries. They all run off the Internet. But the Internet was built — and built out — in the age of the personal computer, when anyone could climb on and tinker from their keyboard.
That openness — almost anarchy — made the Net a wide-open realm [...]

The Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar is underwater, thousands dead, and environmentalists say it’s global warming. Monster tornadoes are plaguing the U.S. — last weekend in Missouri, Oklahoma and Georgia.
Meanwhile, far away, on the west coast of Alaska, the tiny fishing village of Kivalina is falling into the sea. And its attorneys are suing 24 oil, [...]

Public television lion and lightening rod Bill Moyers doesn’t mince words when it comes to what he sees as a clear and present threat to American democracy. Democracy in this country has been a series of narrow escapes, he says.
And now, says Moyers, we may be running out of luck. Money, faction, and fear, he [...]

The headline was hard to sort out. Federal agents swarming the office and home of the top Bush official who was supposed to be protecting federal whistle-blowers.
That official, Scott Bloch, was a controversial Bush appointee. Critics had long claimed that he buried whistle-blower complaints and failed to stop illegal partisan politicking — Bush Republican politicking [...]

It’s just a matter of days now, and Indiana Jones is back in a theater near you.
Harrison Ford, the leather jacket, the bullwhip, the fedora — 27 years after “Raiders of the Lost Ark” they’re practically archeological artifacts themselves. But who cares? Everybody wants to get back to snakes and jungle and desert and adventure.
At [...]

Disaster and a junta in Myanmar this week. Putin out but not out in Russia. The brink of civil war in Lebanon.
And at home — maybe the political end game in the Democrats’ long primary battle.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, hanging in and fighting for its life at the same time. Senator Clinton publicly and plainly pinning [...]

Global big thinker Fareed Zakaria is out with his latest big book, and the title almost says it all: It’s “The Post-American World.”
Take a look at the world and it’s not hard to see: the world’s tallest buildings, biggest airplane, biggest investment fund, biggest movie industry, biggest refinery, biggest casino — heck, the world’s biggest [...]

By the Hebrew calendar, today marks the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel in 1948. And Israel has been celebrating, with picnics and parties and warplanes on display.
Of course, Arabs call the events of 1948 the “naqba” — or catastrophe.
But it’s Israel’s birthday. We’ll observe today with one of the hottest writers of a [...]

Somehow, we just can’t get the image out of our minds. The three-year-old filly, Eight Belles, thundering heroically down the track at the Kentucky Derby in hot pursuit of the winner, Big Brown.
And then, Eight Belles going down. Two ankles broken.
And within minutes put down, on the track. Dead.
It was shocking. Race fans and breeders [...]

Barack Obama stepped out of the worst weeks of his campaign yesterday and turned in a big win in North Carolina.
Hillary Clinton took those same weeks, and a stretch of high Clinton camp spirits, and turned in a squeaker victory — a two-point win — in Indiana.
Everybody’s vowing to battle on, but the raw numbers [...]

The waiting list cases are wrapping up now. The acceptance and rejection letters are up on the fridge or in the trash. But the college admissions season of 2008 is one for the record books.
At 3.3 million, the high school class that just scrambled through admission hoops is the nation’s largest since 1977 — the [...]

If you want a story of coming up gritty in America, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s got it.
A hardscrabble youth in Searchlight, Nevada. Mom doing laundry for brothels. Dad an alcoholic miner. Young Harry hitchhiking forty miles across the desert to high school.
If you want gritty politics, Harry Reid’s got that, too. An in-your-face bad [...]

Sunshine State humorist and novelist Carl Hiaasen knows a lot about Florida and human nature. What he didn’t know was just how ugly his own nature could get when he put it back on the golf course.
Decades after Hiaasen laid down his golf clubs as a young father, he picked them up again at fifty-something. [...]

World food prices are soaring. The world’s poor are hurting. And the price hikes may pinch in a supermarket near you.
In Cameroon and Burkina Faso and Egypt and Indonesia, they’ve rallied and rioted over hunger and the high price of food. In Haiti, they’ve turned out a government.
The U.N. calls it a “silent tsunami,” but [...]

Grand Theft Auto IV, out this week in its millions of red hot copies, is a vast sensation in the video gaming world. It’s a blockbuster — bigger than movies or music and way bigger than books.
It is - as usual - bloody, brutal, grim, dark, wild — a no-holds-barred video crime spree set in [...]

Obama breaks with his pastor, Al Qaeda rises again in Pakistan, and American consumers tighten their belts. Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Ellen Goodman, she is an author and Pulitzer-Prize winning syndicated columnist at The Boston Globe.
Dennis Ryerson, he is editor of the Indianapolis Star. He’s former editor of the Des Moines [...]

In 1911, near Pluto, North Dakota, on the edge of a big Indian reservation, four Indians come across the bodies of a murdered farm family. They quickly become suspects. There’s a lynching.
And from that deadly beginning, novelist Louise Erdrich unfolds her latest big book, “The Plague of Doves.”
Erdrich has planted her flag as one of [...]

Hillary Clinton and John McCain say they want to drop federal gas taxes for the summer. Barack Obama says no.
If you’re strapped for cash and struggling with higher food and energy prices, it can sound like a good idea. But step back just half an inch from presidential campaign follies, and the idea can look [...]