In 1967 18 year old Susanna Kaysen was hustled into a taxicab and sent off to the MacLean psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts for a two week rest. In fact, she was confined for two years.

Twenty five years after her discharge she got access to her records and read her diagnosis: “Borderline personality ….profoundly depressed suicidal…promiscuous. Might kill self or get pregnant,” the paperwork said. Susanna Kaysen’s version today is that she was an unhappy, sensitive, underachieving daughter of eminent academics.

She may have been a typical teenager during the late 1960’s, except that she’d made a lame aspirin suicide attempt. Her therapist at MacLean told her she seemed sad or puzzled. “Of course I was,” she writes. “I was 18, it was spring, and I was behind bars.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Susanna Kaysen, author of “Girl Interrupted”

It’s been fifty years since World War II and the promise of “never again”, but despite real advances in human rights, the atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo have left the world wringing its hands.

Although most modern states have worked human rights into their constitutions and activist networks have blossomed around the globe, countries seem unable to agree on how to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the post-Cold-War 1990s, the West adopted a pattern of giving in to powerful states like China and Russia but strong-arming weak nations like Yugoslavia and Iraq.

And where the West did intervene – in Kosovo, for example, where NATO waged a zero-casualty Virtual War – some argue we did as much harm as good. The reporter/philosopher Michael Ignatief says the human rights movement is struggling for legitimacy and confidence.

We’re having a conversation about the embattled idea of Human Rights in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Ignatieff, author of “A Warrior’s Honor.”

Tom Wolfe, a quarter of a century ago in his manifesto about “the New Journalism,” said that the novel was dying, because a new group of social-literary upstarts were inventing a new genre – literary journalism.

Dead, too, were the old-school, career-track ambitions of news hacks with literary pretensions. No more climbing from beat news to features to maybe ascend to the Vahalla of the worthy writer: the novel.

Wolfe wrote that journalists could set scenes and sketch characters just like novelists, but the journalists had the advantage, because everything they wrote was true. Of course, elegant and informed journalism using a literary voice was around long before the “New Journalism,” and Wolfe has since left the trade to write novels.

If Wolfe didn’t believe deeply enough in his own manifesto, though, others did. Literary journalism has flourished, even as many of it’s traditional print vehicles have struggled. In the New Yorker, Harpers, the center column of The Wall Street Journal, on the web, and in a handful of papers around the country readers can still find true stories faithfully reported in fine prose style.

At a conference at Boston University in early December writers, accomplished and would-be, gathered to read and talk about their craft. We tagged along to record these readings by writers Tracy Kidder, JoAnn Wypijewski, Charlie Pierce, and Mark Kramer.

And so in the first hour of The Conneciton, some true stories well told.

First, Tracy Kidder, author of “House,” “Among Schoolchildren” and the 1982 Pulizter Prize winning “Soul of a New Machine.” Here, Kidder reads an exerpt from his book “Home Town,” a book about Northampton, Massachusetts. This part of the book tells the story of Alan, a lawyer who made millions dealing in real estate around Northampton. It begins at a meeting on the day Alan’s life would change forever.

The next story is by JoAnn Wypijewski, a Senior Editor for The Nation Magazine. “The Secret Sharer” appeared in Harpers Magazine. It’s a story about the Nushawn Williams case – a young, HIV-positive drug dealer from Brooklyn who moved to Jamestown in upstate New York and slept around leaving a micro-demic in his wake. Wypijewski focused on the women in the story. She reads two sections from the piece here, the first beginning with a quote from a song “I Love You Baby” by rapper Puff Daddy.

Charlie Pierce is well-known to many public radio listeners as a commentator on “Only A Game” and “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” Pierce has been a forest ranger and a bowling reporter, a staff writer for both GQ and Esquire. Here he reads a section of a new memoir, “Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer’s Story,” about the disease that struck his father and all his father’s siblings. This reading’s about one day in 1985 when Pierce’s father drove off to the local flower store and disappeared for three days.

Mark Kramer is author of “Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat and Money from the American Soil,” “Invasive Procedures: A Year in the World of Two Surgeons,” and “Travels with a Hungry Bear.” He’s professor of journalism and writer-in-residence at Boston University. This is an exerpt of “Invasive Procedures.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The work of literary journalists Tracy Kidder, JoAnn Wypijewski, Charlie Pierce and Mark Kramer.

It’s been said that “If you want to know a nation, listen to it’s satirists”. So if you want to know America a good place to start is Stan Freberg.

Stan Freberg the grand satirist of radio and records and a legend in the world of marketing was born around the time the first commercial stations starting operating.

Born the son of a Baptist minister in Pascedina, California his love for radio came early on, he say’s that when the other kids went outside to play ball, he went inside to play the radio. It was the daytime radio sitcoms like Vic and Sade, the brainy comedy of Fred Allen and the compelling drama and choruses of Norman Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph” that Stan Freberg sites as influences.

After work doing Cartoon voices for Warner Brother’s, entertaining overseas during WWII, performing in nightclubs and landing several radio acting jobs, Stan Freberg finally landed a hit which he honed from his nightclubs act called “John and Marsha”.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Stan Freberg is our guest this hour, whose CD and Video box set is called “Tip of the Freberg: The Stan Freberg Collection 1951-1998.”

Andy Rooney is television’s most famous curmudgeon. Only he doesn’t like that word.

Rooney doesn’t like a lot of things. And he doesn’t mind complaining publicly. You might say he’s a connoisseur of life’s little annoyances. Like why automobile manufacturers can’t make better bumpers or why the packaging for a bag of potato chips cost more than the chips do or what “all natural” and “fat free” really mean anyway. Or why the phone company and the airlines irritate us so.

Has he ever made you wonder why people collect things on their desks, or why there have to be so many different kinds of electrical cords and adapters? Did you ever wonder why Andy Rooney gets so aggravated about pet food and designer labels and restaurant waiters?

Or about bathing suits and minivans and the way women mow the lawn? You get the idea….don’t you?
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Andy Rooney

George W. Bush will neither confirm nor deny what the late night comedians say about him: “Thinks like a Republican, parties like a Democrat.” But his handlers are listening.

John McCain ignores the dig that he just hired Latrell Sprewell as an anger consultant. Al Gore and Bill Bradly have had to confront the “wooden thing” – one writer said it was like “choosing between a block of maple and a block of oak.”

But while the voters laugh, the campaign managers worry. They all know that good political satire sticks. Dan Quayle will never get past the potato, or Gary Trudeau’s feather. Gerald Ford will always be falling down to open Saturday Night Live.

So as this political season gears up, the candidates are watching all the monologs, comedy sketches and editorial cartoons with fingers crossed.

We’re talking about political humor and the campaign in this hour.
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”, Harry Shearer actor and writer of the Simpsons and “Le Show”, and Tom Toles, syndicated political Cartoonist.

The Alloy Orchestra is just a trio and most of what they play is junk.

They play bedpans and dentist trays and galvanized metal ducts. They play plumbing-pipe chimes and two-by-four vibes and horseshoes for triangles.

Sure, they play the synthesizer, too, and sometimes an accordion or the rare clarinet, but mostly they pound out rhythms on a seven-foot rack of found objects. What they do with their music is just as interesting as the way they make it.

The Alloy Orchestra makes its living accompanying silent films, playing live music to the antics of long-dead stars like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy. They accompany less comic works too – like Metropolis, Nosferatu, and, most recently Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike.

Their role in the cinema is a throwback to an odd bit of the early 20th century – with a late 20th century twist – but it sure puts a bang into silent film…. And a crash, and a bump, thump, clink and clank.

The Alloy Orchestra – in the second hour of The Connection with Ken Winokur, clarinet and percussion; Terry Donahue, percussion, accordion, banjo, tenor guitar; Roger C. Miller, keyboards.
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

The Alloy Orchestra –Ken Winokur, clarinet and percussion

Terry Donahue, percussion, accordion, banjo, tenor guitar

Roger C. Miller, keyboards.

Bill Bradley can count the past and present NBA, the movie director Spike Lee, and the actor Lawrence Fishbourne in his court but still he trails the Vice President among black voters. Al Gore has Bill Clinton on his team and that may be the ball game.

African Americans stayed loyal to Bill Clinton and they don’t see any reason to change teams now. The administration was responsive about appointing black officials, about supporting cities and about affirmative action.

Monday night’s democratic debate in Iowa Race has been an issue in this campaign mostly by way of TV images like the confederate flag and Al Sharpton.

A year after Bill Clinton’s race conversation, is there anything left to talk about and can George W. Bush, the Spanish speaking compassionate conservative and John McCain, the military veteran add anything to it?

Race Issues in Campaign 2000 – in the first hour of the Connection with Professor Orlando Patterson at Harvard University, Professor Roger Wilkins, George Mason University, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, DC, and Professor Michael Eric Dyson, DePaul University and MLK biographer.
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Professor Orlando Patterson at Harvard University, Professor Roger Wilkins, George Mason University, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, DC, and Professor Michael Eric Dyson, DePaul University and MLK biographer.

Israeli authorities have demolished nearly 2,700 Palestinian homes since 1987. Bulldozers arrive with armed Israeli soldiers or policemen, give the family fifteeen minutes to grab some belongings and clear out, and quickly reduce the house to rubble.

Family members and neighbors who protest or refuse to leave can be beaten, tear-gassed, shot with rubber-coated metal bullets, and arrested. There is no advance notice of date and time for a demolition, and in East Jerusalem alone, over a third of the Palestinian families are living under threat of having their homes razed.

According to Israeli authorities, the demolitions are just the normal application of municipal laws designed in the public interest; only buildings that don’t meet code and permit requirements are destroyed, they say. Israeli activists opposed to the policy see it as a rigged game: Palestinians can’t get building permits and Jewish homes are almost never demolished.

The home front in the Israeli Palestinian dispute, in this hour of The Connection with Hannan Ashrawi, Member of the Palestinian Labor Council, David Bar Elon, former cabinet minister of the Netanyahu government, Jeff Halper, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and Salim Shawamreh who’s rebuilt his house in the West Bank three times.
(Hoasted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Hannan Ashrawi, Member of the Palestinian Labor Council, David Bar Elon, former cabinet minister of the Netanyahu government, Jeff Halper, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and Salim Shawamreh who’s rebuilt his house in the West Bank three times.

The writer, jazz musician, and academic Jay Keyser is not exactly an intrepid traveller. In fact, he has a hard time leaving the comfort and security of his house in the morning.

So it comes as no surprise that an African safari is his nightmare vacation. The very idea of it – the vaccinations, the unfamiliar foreign country, the fraternising with hippos and lions – terrifies him. And yet he’s gone on three such expeditions and survived to tell the tale.

He feels overwhelmed every minute of his time in the game parks and spends his days writing a diary as a form of escape. When people ask him whether he’s enjoying himself, he says “I won’t know until I go home and read my journals.”

Despite his deep ambivalence about the elephants, giraffes, and impala, Kaiser delights in sketching his fearless companions – mostly women – having such a grand time.

We’re going on an Accidental Safari in this hour of The Connection with Gaby Whitehouse, who runs her own safari group and Jay Keyser, writer and reluctant traveller.
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Gaby Whitehouse, who runs her own safari group and Jay Keyser, writer and reluctant traveller.