this Christmas season was the coming of age of e-shopping then this primary season may the coming of age of E-Politics.

A quarter of Americans on-line check out their candidates virtually before they cast their votes, and now having a good website is a critical component of every major – and minor candidates – campaign. Jesse Ventura was one of the first politicians to use the web to his advantage – he credits his victory to the money, volunteers, and voters drawn in through cyberspace.

But like all things Internet, so much diversity often sounds like just a lot of static. Enter the Political Portal – a new breed of web community that organizes political information for you.

Has the Web come into its own as a political median in the way Televison changed presidential politics in 1960? We still can’t vote online but that’s all about to change this spring when Idaho and Arizona officially open the polls on-line for the first “E”-lection.
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Jacob Weisberg, chief political correspondent for Slate magazine, and Phil Madsen web producer for Jesse Ventura’s campaign.

Athletics are meant to be America’s level playing field, a place where success is measurable in points or split times; a place where anyone can try out. The juncture of sports and race, though, also forms a fault line in American history, and nowhere more so than where the two meet science.

Evolution was being used as a rational for racial supremacy as soon as The Origin of Species had escaped Darwin’s pen – always in favor of the whites. Sport was often the most obvious proving ground, but in the past fifty years black atheletes have come to dominate many sports, turning the old argument on its head.

The Nature side of this debate isn’t a popular one, even if a look around the sporting world shows African, not Aryan, dominance. The PC byword on race and sports is opportunity, but some are beginning to re-link race and genetics in forming the superior athelete.

If the race is to the swift, does swiftness depend on the race?
(Hosted by Bob Oakes)

Guests:

Jon Entine, author.

If you want to make it big in today’s new economy, throw out those watermarked resumes and get rid of the dark suit.

The best preparation for a job interview these days may be a weekend spent tinkering with legos and scratching out ideas in a book of brain teasers. In the old days – perhaps 3 or 4 years ago – everyone’s nightmare interview question was “what do you see yourself doing in 5 years?”

But now it turns out that hot young companies desperate for new blood don’t think that line of questioning is so hip either. Silicon Valley startups need to evaluate vision, energy, and attitude, not how well a candidate can lie about his or her strengths and weaknesses.

The wave of the future for job interviews could be fun: group games that test your team spirit; riddles that examine your ingenuity; and unfamiliar scenarios that measure your cool. The New New Job Interview – in this hour of The Connection
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, editors of Fast Company.

In 1995 when Evan Dobelle was appointed President of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he arrived to a campus that was surrounded by drug addicts, decaying buildings and a high crime rate.

The bank, insurance and manufacturing bigwigs of the past century were ghosts. None of the teachers or administrators of the college lived in walking distance of the school.

Dobelle wouldn’t tolerate the poverty outside Trinity’s privileged gates, so he unlocked the padlocks and invited the neighborhood into the ivory tower. He got the city to condemn two crack houses, bought them with Trinity money and knocked them down.

In its place he built a Boys’ and Girls’ Club, complete with swimming pool and modern facilities and staffed it with Trinity professionals and student volunteers. He’s now behind a $200 million redevelopment of the area with new schools and housing.

People are moving back to the city, houses are getting renovated and Trinity’s enrollment is up. We’re reinventing ties between town and gown in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Franz Schubert’s last job on his death bed in Vienna in 1828 was to correct the proofs of his song cycle, Die Winterreise, or Winter Journey.

So the despairing lovesick madman in these gorgeous but relentlessly bleak last songs has never been detached from the picture of Schubert himself, his heart on fire, his body dying of syphillis at the age of 31, a musical genius on the scale of Beethoven being snuffed out even younger than Mozart.

The twenty four songs in Die Winterreise stare unblinking into the dark side: with serenity at moments, in a spirit of tragic loneliness at others. “I must find my own way in this darkness,” the traveler sings at the outset, as his tears freeze on his cheeks.

By the end he is staggering into the cold with a numb-fingered organ grinder, his accompanist in the songs of despair.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Pianist Craig Smith and baritone William Hite

It’s an advertising maxim that sex sells. So what do AIDS patients, war victims, Downs Syndrome kids, and mangled animals have to do with advertising sweaters?

Benetton, the Italian clothing company, has shocked the world repeatedly since 1984 with its in-your-face photographs: a large splash of blood represents the war in Kosovo; a white child suckling on a black breast tackles racism; and a priest and nun kissing take on religious institutions.

For it’s newest ad campaign, Benetton has produced a glossy Talk Magazine insert full of photographs of death-row inmates. The company has been censured and censored all over the world for its taste in promoting itself off the pain of sick, poor, and wounded people.

But Benetton claims it’s showing us reality, unlike the many ads that flatter consumers with lies. Benetton’s art of seduction, in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ken Shulman, freelance reporter and writer for the latest Benetton project, and Oliviero Toscani, creative director for photography for Benetton’s ad campains since 1984.

In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten made an artistic and religious revolution against the still background of a millennium of unchanging tradition.

He’d inherited a taste for the avant-garde from his father, then played fast and loose with the rules of all the visual arts. His painters and sculptors lengthened faces, plumped hips, and depicted ordinary, intimate moments of life. Akhenaten also reduced Egypt’s vast array of gods to Aten, the Sun, the one and only making himself thereby perhaps the world’s first monotheist.

When the Egyptian capital of Thebes proved too confining for Akhenaten’s new vision, he created an entirely new city 200 miles away called Amarna, where the decorated temples reflected his new sensibilities.

And to top it off, he married Neferetiti, a stunning and powerful woman who helped govern the country.

The mysterious, intriguing, and surprisingly modern world of Akhenaten – in the second hour of the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Rita Freed, curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Donald Redford, Egyptologist at Penn State University.

The real Y2K bug this winter is the Sydney strain of the flu which has hit millions of people and burdened hospitals all over Europe and North America.

The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 is the ultimate flu baseline. Somewhere between 20 million and 100 million people died; it was the single biggest disaster in human history and its origins are still a mystery.

New York Times Science reporter Gina Kolata has written an account of the 1918 flu epidemic and profiled a group of flu hunters who have traced the last sources of the virus to tissue samples from a woman buried under the permafrost in Alaska and two soldiers who died in World War I Army camps.

They’re determined to solve the puzzle of the Spanish flu in part because they say it could strike again. The flu is on this hour of the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gina Kolata, New York Times science correspondent and author of “Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search fo the Virus that Caused It,” and Dr. Edwin Kilbourne, professor of microbiology and immunology at New York Medical College.

It was a big moment in Roger Shattuck’s life when he realized that while he was a liberal in politics-that is, a decent egalitarian improver of on the social scene-he was a conservationist in culture, skeptical about fashion and dubious about improvement in the artistic and spiritual measure of man.

From that bold moment of illumination, Roger Shattuck has sounded less and less like everybody’s idea of the university professor of Great Books literature, though he was all of that.

He’s sounded more and more like the crankiest wise man in your village book club, with passionate opinions on why you must press on with Proust and forget Foucault; why “The Story of My Life” by Helen Keller is required reading and Nietsche’s not good for you; and why “Absalom, Absalom” by William Faulkner is the closest American approach to the majesty of Shakespeare.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Roger Shattuck, author of Candor and Perversion, a catalogue of books.

The newest news in the ongoing new news/old news convergence is the 350-billion-dollar merger of America Online and Time-Warner, Inc. The multimedia marriage joins 20-million internet subscribers with 13 million cable-hooked households and the gigantic CNN-news empire.

The colossal corporate marquis announces brands like Netscape, Time, and Fortune, Moviefone, Warner Brothers and HBO, Sports Illustrated, People and Entertainment Weekly, TBS, TNT, and Compuserve.

It’s the first mega-merger where the money’s on the dot-com side of the equations, marking a kind of coming of age for internet business and maybe eradicating once and for all the distinction between new and old media.

AOL/Time-Warner promises channel surfing and net-surfing, Cartoon Network and cable networking, magazine stands and instant messaging.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlene Li, new media/portals analyst, Forrester Research, and Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal reporter and author of “AOL.com.”