We look at that archetypal character, the American Nerd.

Filling up your tank these days can set you back $50, $100, even $150.
That’s big money. And in many families, it means something else has got to give. It could be meals out. The summer road trip. The super-sized SUV. The suburban house.
Americans are already cutting back. They’re driving [...]

This week, Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, announced he’s stepping down after 17 years at the helm.
Forty-four years total at the newspaper, where he arrived as a summer intern in 1964.
Many of the stories he’s had a hand in are defining: Watergate. Secret CIA prisons. Walter Reed. The Post has [...]

Topping the news this week: Handguns. Democratic unity. And a North Korea breakthrough.

The numbers out this week show a housing market going to hell in a handbasket — if we’re not already there. Prices plunging at historic rates, home sales dropping all over.
As Congress haggles over a landmark bill to provide relief for beleaguered homeowners, everyone wants to know if we’ve hit bottom yet, or if there’s [...]

Step into summertime with novelist Roxana Robinson, and yes, you’ll have the twittering of finches in lilacs, long grass in the meadow, and the sunny house on the water. But the living is anything but easy.
Roxana Robinson has built a big following writing about the American attitude of entitlement — to happiness, to love, [...]

In the world of the Internet, Jeff Bezos is a giant. A pioneer. In the old days, they might have said a god.
He started Amazon.com when e-commerce was next to nothing and the web was still a whisper. Today, Bezos is a billionaire, Amazon is ubiquitous, and the web, well, it’s the way [...]

Young conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are the toast of Republican thought circles right now. But their call to Republican revival is also a broadside.
Bush-era crony capitalism and government neglect, they charge, have pushed the USA toward a Latin American model of rich and poor and nothing in between.
If the Grand Old Party wants [...]

Americans believe in markets, and, over time, markets have worked very well for Americans. But what about now, when oil markets and oil prices and speculation in those markets are sky high and still climbing?
We know oil supply is not infinite, and demand is huge. We knew cheap oil couldn’t last forever. [...]

Felix Dennis, founder of Maxim magazine, is rich. He says you’ve got to be ruthless and he’s all for it.

It’s going on seven years since the United States invaded Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. But the news out of Afghanistan in the last couple of days and weeks hardly sounds like a wrap-up phase.
A giant jailbreak in the traditional southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. NATO forces rushed from Kabul to a [...]

We love our gardens. The fresh tomatoes, the melons, the zinnias, the peas, the flowering bushes placed just so, the trowel and shovel, the garden path.
But sore backs, dirty knees and, finally, sweet corn are just the beginning of our affair with the garden, says philosopher-guide Robert Pogue Harrison.
Harrison has gone deep on forests, [...]

Two floods and a lot of news this week. The flood above all in the Midwest, as levee-topping waters now surge down the Mississippi with exhausted sandbaggers and destruction in their wake.
And the flood nationally at the gas pump, as gasoline prices climb higher and higher, swamping family budgets.
Then the news. Obama drops out [...]

It may be beautiful, but everybody knows marriage isn’t easy.
Who pays the bills? Who works or stays home? Who unloads the dishwasher?
So what about gay marriage? Gay partnerships?
Yesterday, California was ringing with gay wedding bells, on its first full day of legal gay marriage. But gay marriage is not new anymore. [...]

Talk about awkward.
The United States and Iraq are negotiating a new legal framework for U.S. military operations in Iraq. A new “status of forces agreement.”
And Iraq’s prime minister stands up and says the negotiations aren’t working. That they’re at an impasse. That Iraq’s demands are unacceptable to the U.S. and U.S. demands [...]

A conversation with playwright Neil LaBute.

All attitude — TV, and the world after the late Tim Russert.

Dr. Thomas Graboys talks about his own Parkinson’s disease.

On the presidential campaign trail it is “veepstakes” season: John McCain and Barack Obama, being watched everyday now for any hint of who they’ll pick to complete their ticket.
McCain would be 72 on inauguration day — the oldest president ever sworn in. How old should his running mate be? And who?
Obama, first African-American [...]

Decision, destruction, and swirling debate. The Supreme Court gives a big win to Guantanamo detainees. Pakistan claims a U.S. air strike killed its troops. In Europe, President Bush talks tough on Iran.
Back home, hell and high water. Floods and a tornado devastate the Midwest. Four Boy Scouts are dead.
Oil prices get scarier. Tainted tomatoes sicken [...]

America’s health care costs are breaking budgets all over, but the tab for pharmaceuticals just keeps rising.
In 1980, Americans spent $12 billion on prescription drugs. Now it’s more like $200 billion. More than any other country — and yet we don’t live longer than others.
Reporter Melody Petersen asked what’s going on. What she found was [...]

Say “Rwanda,” and most of the world thinks genocide and death.
In one hundred days in 1994, Hutu militias slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The scale and speed of slaughter were astounding.
Now, against all odds, says journalist Stephen Kinzer, Rwanda is on a brilliant comeback trail. Led by hardnosed Tutsi president Paul Kagame, Rwanda is [...]

Prospects for democracy in Zimbabwe continue to look bleak, as President Mugabe cracks down on the opposition. We’ll hear the latest about rising violence ahead of the June 27 elections, and what it means for the region.
- Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Scott Baldauf, South Africa bureau chief and staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

Talk about an ugly economic picture — America is staring at one right now. Recession blues. Stagnation. Inflation on the rise. High oil. Foreclosure all over.
Pocketbook issues have soared to number one on the list of Americans’ campaign season concerns — and Barack Obama and John McCain know it.
This week, they’re both out there stumping [...]

Look at a map of the USA, and every state tells a story. Oklahoma’s panhandle tells a tale of slavery. Missouri’s boot-heel hitch into Arkansas is the footprint of a real earthquake and one man’s dream.
Texas and California are huge for a reason. There’s a tale in West Virginia’s unicorn horn.
State boundaries may look like [...]

There is no precedent in American history for the hammer Secretary of Defense Robert Gates brought down on the Air Force last week.
In one day, one announcement, the top general and top civilian leader of the Air Force — both out. Canned.
Gates sited a “chain of failures” in U.S. nuclear security, including an Air Force [...]

Conservative columnist George Will’s career has traced the rise, and what many conservatives now fear is the fall, of the conservative movement in America.
His first column appeared in The Washington Post in 1974. In the Reagan years, his bow tie, polished wit, and penchant for quoting British lords, made him one of the most widely [...]

For thirty years now, more and more Americans have flown at the drop of a hat. Cheaper flights and more flights made the country seem smaller.
Home in Dallas. Cabin in Vermont. Kids in California. Parents in Florida. Vacation far away — no problem, we’ll all fly.
But the oil price surge that is spiking gas prices [...]

William “Count” Basie didn’t really read music. He and his band — rolling out of Kansas City, on their way to the American stage — just made it up.
Felt it in their bones. Blew it on their horns. Played it on keyboards, and behind Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, in the late 1930s, in a [...]

It’s been a week for the history books. A black man at the top of an American presidential ticket, and a woman right on his heels — and maybe, still, at his side.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton met secretly in Washington yesterday for a conversation the rest of the country can only imagine — after [...]

NBA finals, Game One tonight, and it’s a storied match-up. Boston Celtics. Los Angeles Lakers. Between them they’ve won almost half the championships in NBA history.
For professional basketball, the classic tip-off can’t come soon enough. The Celtics-Lakers era of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson made the NBA a sports powerhouse. Michael Jordan and the Chicago [...]

The Senate debates a global warming bill this week — and its backers say it’s made to save the planet.
It is huge legislation that would cap CO2 emissions and — to fight climate change — would radically reshape the US economy and energy use.
No one thinks it’s going to pass this year. But Barack Obama [...]

On the face of it, at school, Acia Johnson was a miracle. The story we all dream of — long for — for the children of America’s tough inner cities.
She was 14, all smiles, and — in spite of a tough life at home — Acia Johnson was on her way to better things. Straight [...]

There was history made yesterday in the Democratic Party, the first African American to claim a major party’s presidential nomination: Barack Obama — before a rapturous crowd in Minnesota — claiming the prize after an epic campaign.
And there was mystery in the Democratic Party: Hillary Clinton, watching the same last primary results come in from [...]

In storybook America, when folks sit down at the barbeque, at the bar, at the town bowling alley, at the local cafe, they come in all political and cultural stripes.
Conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, independents — all rubbing elbows, pitching in their two cents, hashing out the way of a great democracy.
In real America today, says [...]

The big news in Western media out of Al Qaeda country lately is that Al Qaeda is in trouble. That the spearhead of global terrorism is being rejected by mainstream Muslims sick of death and destruction, even rejected by onetime theorists of jihad.
New Yorker magazine reporter Lawrence Wright has gone deep on what he calls [...]

Every book lover knows the thrill. A hot summer day. A porch swing, a hammock, a long curve in the beach — and a great, transporting read.
Maybe it’s lords and ladies that first took you there. Or Spanish romance. High plains gunfire. Down and dirty spies. High-blown history. Distant lands.
This hour we’re asking top book [...]

There are just two more states — one more day — in the Democrats’ marathon primary battle. South Dakota and Montana, tomorrow — and that’s it for primary voting.
But the last chapter may already have been written in Washington this weekend, when the Democrats’ Rules Committee sat down to vote on how to treat the [...]