Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, joins Michael Krasny in the studio. Simon's new book "Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other" chronicles his experience adopting two little girls from China.
Journalist Meredith Maran's new book "My Lie" examines the recovered memory movement of the 1980s and 90s, when many people had memories of childhood abuse which later turned out to be faulty or fabricated.
I am not going to reveal anything about #1 bestseller (and Oprah choice) FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen. Suffice it to say that the New York Times book review by Sam Tanenhaus called it "a classic of American fiction" and, honest to God, that praise was mild compared to most major reviews. Personally, I found the book to be the best fiction work I have read in decades and, not meaning to brag, I read a lot of fiction. The characters in the book will stay with me forever. At least, I hope so...Read the full TPMCafe story here. See also: The Corrections: A Novel
, How to Be Alone: Essays
, and this American Thinker post.
September 29, 2010 - Steven Rattner Views: 135,162 Aired: 09/29/10 Episode 06124 The koala population suffers from Chlamydia, and Steven Rattner discusses the auto industry bailout.
, Promoting Sustainable Economies in the Balkans: Independent Task Force Report
, Charlie Rose with William Owens; Steven Rattner; Hannah Pakula (December 21, 1995)
It's strange to think of human rights as having a history, much less a controversial one. Could anyone but a monster deny that every person has a right to be free and equal, to be protected against torture and censorship, to have enough to eat? Our reverence for human rights is so instinctive that, in the 21st century, whenever we see a gross injustice being committed, the most powerful objection we know how to raise is that someone's human rights are being violated -- whether it is Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib or women sentenced to stoning in Iran. And a whole powerful infrastructure has grown up to protect these rights, from the International Criminal Court to nongovernmental organizations like Human Rights Watch, which just received a $100 million donation from George Soros.Read the full Salon.com story here. See also: Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era
Linda Polman wants donors and aid organizations to work together to fight abuse, theft and corruption.Read the full The Daily Show with Jon Stewart post here. See also: We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn't Always Come Out When the UN Goes in
[2010-09-29 13:00:00] On a special Best-of-Think program this hour, we'll revisit conversations from earlier this year with Julie Hersch, who tells the story of her struggle with depression and suicide in her book "Struck by Living" (Brown Books, 2010) and Jerre Tracy, who works to preserve endangered local historic places as Executive Director of Historic Fort Worth.Download the podcast here. Other titles often seen on "Best of" lists: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
, Simple Wisdom for the Not So Simple Business World-International book Award-Best Business/Motivational book of 2010
, The Best American Mystery Stories 2010 (The Best American Series (R))
, Steadfast Christian: A higher call to faith, family, and hope (National Award Winner, "Best Books 2010" Awards)
Sitting in his Mercury Radio Arts office three days later, Beck told me that he, too, noticed the silence and was astounded. “If someone had told me, ‘Hey, why don’t you tell some history stories at the end, and there will be dead silence,’ I’d have said, ‘No way.’ ” Beck has great distrust of success, especially his own. Friends say he is terrified of something going wrong, someone in his audience “doing something stupid” (presumably code for violence). There is a certain boyish disbelief in Beck as he engages in his real-time assessment, often on the air. “I told my wife, ‘I can’t believe I actually have reporters following me to Alaska,’ ” he said. (Note: reporter’s wife said the same thing.)
Beck told me that he recently threw away all of his old tapes from his Morning Zoo years, so his kids could not hear them. He has no idea what his role is in the political firmament. The notion seems to bore him. His most animated attacks on Obama in the days after the “Restoring Honor” rally were over his take on the president’s religious convictions, which Beck called “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”
He is fragile, on the edge. There is no template for him or for where he is headed. “I have not prepared my whole life to be here,” Beck told me from his plush couch, his face turning bright pink. “I prepared my whole life to be in a back alley.” I expected him to cry, but he did not.
Technology is changing the way we live, work and interact with each other. Some critics worry that Google is making us stupid, that Twitter is eroding our people skills, and that social networks like Facebook are actually making us less social in the "real" world. Not so, says tech writer Nick Bilton. We talk with a techno-optimist about the positive impacts of "disruptive" technologies.Listen to the full podcast here.
), and she basically said that now is not the time to just live a decent life, as Stewart was asking or even alluding to. She basically said that America is at a turning point, and that everybody has to rally (literally, on the streets); she's arranging buses everyone around the country that needs and wants a lift, and she's really advocating a call to arms, basically. We'll see what happens October 30th.
September 28, 2010 - Ross Douthat Views: 143,127 Aired: 09/28/10 Episode 06123 Democratic voters suffer from apathy, and Stephen doubts if Ross Douthat is that conservative.
, Charlie Rose - Andrew Exum / Ross Douthat (July 27, 2009)
, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
, Charlie Rose - Andrew Exum / Ross Douthat (July 27, 2009)
[2010-09-28 12:00:00] Is the search for a unified theory a misguided effort? We'll talk this hour with physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow, co-author with Stephen Hawking of the new book "The Grand Design" (Bantam, 2010).Download the podcast here. See also: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage)
, Euclid's Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life
As 40th anniversary celebrations get underway surrounding the book, 'Our Bodies Ourselves,' a new history examines the battles of ordinary women in demanding equality, choice and respect in medical treatment and education about their own bodies.Read the full PhysOrg story here. See also: Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth
, Our Bodies Ourselves For The New Century (A Touchstone book)
, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause
Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause
Confiscable: liable to be taken by an authorized party. As in this quote: He knew of about a thousand bales of cotton, some of it private property, some of it confiscable , stored at various points on the banks of the Alabama (Ambrose Bierce, For the Ahkoond)Read the full Dictionary.com Word of the Day post here.
Economist Robert Reich argues that the economy isn't going to get moving again until we address a fundamental problem: the growing concentration of wealth and income among the richest Americans. He explains his fears for America's economic recovery in Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future.Read the full NPR Books post, listen to the podcast here.
Ted Rall's new book "The Anti-American Manifesto" advocates for violent revolution, even if we have to join with rightwingers and racists to do it, and even if we have no control over the outcome which could easily be something worse than what we've got. We have a moral duty, Rall argues, to kill some people. Now, I much prefer a debate over what radical steps to take to a debate over whether it's really appropriate for President Obama to whine about people's lack of enthusiasm for voting. Should we try to pep people up for him or gently nudge him to appoint a new chief of staff who's not a vicious warmongering corporatist?
It's Banned Books Week, and for an event like this, it never hurts to have a cause celebre. This year, organizers had only to turn to Twitter, where people have been rallying behind the young-adult author Laurie Halse Anderson, whose novel "Speak" has found itself at the center of a heated censorship debate. - read the NYT article here.
A new Pew survey is pretty much guaranteed to ruffle the feathers of the faithful. In a survey of religious knowledge, Americans did fairly poorly, displaying little knowledge of world religions. More provocatively, Americans did not even know much about their own religions. A shocking forty-five percent of Catholics incorrectly answered a question about Catholicism and Communion, for example. To make matters worse, it seems that those who scored highest on this survey were, in fact, atheists and agnostics. The next-highest scoring groups were Jews and Mormons. 'Religion Congruence Fallacy' That's what "academics call it," writes Jeffrey Weiss at Politics Daily, referring to the phenomenon of "Americans who say they belong to a particular religious tradition tend[ing] not to act like it," whether through premarital sex or divorce or what-have-you. He points out that, until this survey, there had been little evidence to support scholar Stephen Prothero's claim that "Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion." Weiss is skeptical, though, about some of the questions (on which Prothero, apparently, was consulted), which, he says " read to me as if they were taken from a religion version of Trivial Pursuit." That said, he's fascinated by the fact that Jews, Mormons, and the "religiously unaffiliated" do so well, and is particularly struck by the responses to two questions [...]Read the full Atlantic article here. See also: Statistics on Religion in America Report -- Pew Forum on Religion, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert
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It has always been tough to get published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers. - WSJ article
September 27, 2010 - Ken Burns Views: 187,133 Aired: 09/27/10 Episode 06122 The GOP blocks the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," and Ken Burns talks about "The Tenth Inning."
, Ken Burns: National Parks - America's Best Idea
, Baseball: The Tenth Inning
, The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns
First line, last line, or Ford Madox Ford's p99 challenge? Actually, a good book should pass all of these. Ford Madox Ford is such an evergreen English writer. The Good Soldier is one of the most remarkable and influential novels of the 20th century. Currently FMF is back in the news for his dictum that you can judge any book by any one of its pages. What he actually said was: "Open the book to page 99 and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." This lit crit nugget was first picked up in the USA by the punk rock band, Pg. 99, but it is now enjoying a vogue as an ideal way to cut through the blizzard of overproduction in books of all sorts. The p99 test does many things, but it also ruthlessly speeds up the selection process in a crowded marketplace. Some will say it's unfair, random and capricious, but I disagree. As readers we pay a lot of attention to (and love to quote) those striking first lines, for example: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen, Pride and PrejudiceRead the full Guardian article here.
Sorry, we were too immersed in re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (gotta prep for part one of the movie, natch!) to realize the irony that the 2010 Banned Books Week started on Saturday. - The Seattlest
 FOXNews | Pentagon Destroys Copies of Controversial Memoir Written by Army Officer FOXNews The Defense Intelligence Agency has blocked a book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger." The Pentagon has burned 9500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. ... Pentagon Buys Operation Dark Heart, Destroys for National SecurityIndyPosted Pentagon destroys thousands of copies of Army officer's memoirCNN International Pentagon Destroys Copies Of Army Officer MemoirFOX 9 News Toronto Sun -AHN | All Headline News -New York Daily News all 73 news articles » |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” said he’s concerned budget deficits in the U.S. are spiraling out of control and may now represent a bigger problem than in countries such as Greece. “The U.S. is probably the worst of all,” Taleb told Canada’s BNN television network in an interview today. “They are addicted to debt. We have an administration that, unlike the European administrations, is not aware of the risks of mounting deficits, of the addiction to public deficits and to big government.”Read the full BusinessWeek story here.
773 September 23 None Oscar Goodman "Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gives 100 million dollars to the Newark school system. So kids, support your school by spending all day on Facebook. This is The Colbert Report."
, Arturo Toscanini conducts an All-American Program / Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F / Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, etc.
, Mob Law [VHS]
"Call of the Wild" kicks off the first part of a bear series. Follow KBIA's Margaret Berglund as she traps bears, explains the Science behind new bear research and explores the controversy surrounding bear-hunting. And lead author of MU's Bisphenol A study talks about the health implications of this toxic chemical found in plastics.Check the podcast out here.
In "THE 99," Naif Al-Mutawa's new generation of comic book heroes fight more than crime -- they smash stereotypes and battle extremism. Named after the 99 attributes of Allah, his characters reinforce positive messages of Islam and cross cultures to create a new moral framework for confronting evil, even teaming up with the Justice League of America.
, Little Women (Signet Classics)
, and The Best of Louisa May Alcott: Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo's Boys, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom (7 great books in one)
772 September 22 The More You No Guillermo del Toro "Hey FOX, I would make a great American Idol judge: American Idol should be canceled. See, how well I judged it? This is The Colbert Report."
, The Strain (The Strain Trilogy)
, The Devil's Backbone (Special Edition)
, Eternal Night
Is it getting harder to make new ground-breaking scientific discoveries? Science correspondent Tom Feilden reports on the significance of latest scientific breakthroughs and Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, explains why he does not think that humanity has reached the end of discovery yet.Listen to the discussion, full podcast here.
771 September 21 None Mark Shriver, Eric Schmidt "All your favorite shows are back this week. But remember, I'm the only one who never left you. This is The Colbert Report." 6119
, The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs
[2010-09-21 13:00:00] The State Fair of Texas begins its 24-day run this weekend and this hour we'll explore the historic place where it all goes down with Willis Winters, Assistant Director of the Dallas Parks & Recreation Department. His new book is "Fair Park" (Arcadia Publishing, 2010).
When Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was released last month, critics showered it with praise. NPR called it "surprisingly moving and even hopeful"; the New York Times said it's "an indelible portrait of our times"; New York Magazine declared it "a work of total genius." Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club—despite her fraught past with Franzen.Oh, how they parry and joust, over a whole lot of nothing. It's a fine book, quit marketing already. Read The Atlantic hoopla here.
Christopher Brownfield’s memoir, “My Nuclear Family,” is not the best book written by an insider about America’s post-9/11 military, but it’s certainly the most entertaining. It’s got a cocky, star-spangled, wide-angle feel, as if a subversive young novelist had decided to rewrite a Tom Clancy thriller after first piloting some nuclear submarines as a gonzo practice drill. “My Nuclear Family” is, in part, the story of a political conversion. Mr. Brownfield voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 2001. He gleefully chanted Oliver North’s name — “Ol-lie, Ol-lie, Ol-lie” — along with his brigade when Mr. North waved from the stadium stands at the Army-Navy football game.
In other words, it was everything Stewart’s rally isn’t. This upcoming event in Washington just takes the formerly disruptive Daily Show model and marks its final transition to another element within the system of political media. Rather than critiquing the system from the outside, it’s now a participant fully enmeshed, and if employing two former Clinton aides isn’t a mark of political professionalization, I don’t know what is. It’s impressive that a comedy talk show was able to make this transition, but I’m not sure if it’s actually good for the show’s audience. After all, we have lots of political media, but we only had one Daily Show, and its value stemmed in large part from its outsider position. Once it becomes an insider and falls prey to all the problems it used to gleefully skewer, it’s unclear what value it can have aside from being the funnier David Brooks. If they seemed interested in doing anything different, I might be behind them. But as long as they’re only out to perpetuate the biggest lie we tell ourselves about politics - that we’re right, and everyone agrees with us - count me out.Must read blog post. Yeah, Stewart's kind of like the Michael Moore of 2004. See also: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42447.html
770 September 20 None Pavement "A man with no arms and no legs has swum the English Channel. Wow, is he gonna be pissed when he finds out about the Chunnel train. This is The Colbert Report."
, Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe
, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins
In the epilogue to his new book, “Overhaul,” Steven Rattner tallies up the bill for the government assistance that spared General Motors, Chrysler and their financial subsidiaries and automotive suppliers from ruin. The total, authorized by the Bush and Obama administrations in 2008 and 2009, comes to a staggering $81.8 billion. While that government assistance has kept the companies alive, “predicting with any accuracy how much of the $82 billion of bailout money will ultimately be recovered is a difficult exercise,” writes Mr. Rattner, a former journalist for The New York Times and a financier who led President Obama’s restructuring effort.
On Friday's "O'Reilly Factor," Glenn Beck argued with Bill O'Reilly over whether he was the "leader" of the Tea Party movement. In O'Reilly's upcoming book, Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama, he says the Tea Party is "led by Fox News commentator and radio talk show host Glenn Beck." Beck took exception to that characterization, telling O'Reilly, "I'm not leading [the Tea Party].""Pinheads" is in that title. For that alone, we're looking it up. We're citing HuffPo BTW. See also: The Overton Window
, Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government
, Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine
If doctors listen more carefully to patients' conversations about work and family life, they can pick up clues that lead to better treatment, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Author Dr. Alan Schwartz talks about training doctors to be better listeners.Download the podcast here.
Oprah Winfrey chose Jonathan Franzen's new book "Freedom" for her book club on Friday, calling it a "masterpiece" nine years after she canceled his appearance on her show when he expressed ambivalence over her endorsement of one of his previous works. "I am...Of course she did. Of course SF Gate is covering this.
As people have become more and more dependent on the Internet, some have concerns that all that information (and the devices that help us connect to it) could be doing seriously damage to the way we think, interact and learn. But Nick Bilton, lead writer for the New York Times Bits Blog, explains in his new book that he's lived his whole life connected and managed to turn out just fine. He says scientific research backs up his experience.Read the full WNYC On The Media post here. See also: I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
, (I LIVE IN THE FUTURE & HERE'S HOW IT WORKS) WHY YOUR WORLD, WORK, AND BRAIN ARE BEING CREATIVELY DISRUPTED BY Bilton, Nick(Author)Hardcover{I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted}
