Someone once said that David Frishberg writes the lyrics that Noel Coward would have written if he been born Jewish in St. Paul, Minnesota:

“I’m too much, I’m a gas, I am anything but middle class.”

Frishberg writes in the song “I’m Hip”, his songwriting puts him in the league of Cole Porter and George Gershwin. He writes songs about being his attourney Bernie, Marilyn Monroe and Sweet Kentucky Ham. Other songs poke at social boredom, New York City and sometimes peers into an uglier world, too.

He writes songs that string lists of baseball players or cliches, or excuses rather than tell a story. In the song “Blizzard of Lies he sings”:

We’ll send someone right out /
this won’t hurt a bit /
He’s in a meeting now /
the coat’s a perfect fit.

The wry, witty, and sometimes lamenting music of David Frishberg in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Frishberg

We are living, Matt Ridley says, through the greatest moment in the history of human understanding. He’s not joking, and he’s not alone in his view.

In the next year, or two or three, we will all be able to read a book revealing more about our origins and evolution, our nature and our behavior than all the efforts of science before this. It will revolutionize medicine, psychology, anthropology and every other human science.

A draft of the human genome is already written in 23 chromosomes – or chapters – in almost every cell of our bodies.

The genome is profoundly book-like, Ridley claims it’s digital information is defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large lexicon of meanings. And it’s just begging to be read as a 600 million year autobiography of our own species, and a handbook of our talents, diseases, physical dimensions and social roles.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Matt Ridley, author of “Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.”

David Ebershoff’s first novel, “The Danish Girl,” is based on a true story.

Einar and Gerda Wegener were married painters living in Denmark in the 1920’s. One day, when a female model failed to keep her appointment, Gerda asked her husband, Einar, to dress as a woman so she could finish the portrait.

Einar did his wife the favor/obliged his wife – and nothing was ever the same again. Einar soon adopted another identity as Lili, frequently posing for Gerda. Gerda’s career blossomed and her muse, Lili, became famous.

With the support of his wife, Einar had the first ever sex change operation in 1931 and emerged as Lili Elbe. The story of Einar’s transformation and the mysterious dual life he lived with his wife as both man and woman exploded in newspapers around the world.

David Ebershoff’s fictionalized account of this remarkable marriage, “The Danish Girl” – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Writer David Ebershoff

The telescopes out there in space now can see billions of light years into the distance – that’s billions times trillions of miles.

But think of it as looking into time: in a universe that may be only 10 or 15 billion years old, it means that we’re seeing not just distance but deep into the history of it all, more than halfway back to the big bang or whatever got it started.

In this hour of The Connection we’re peering into the corners of the universe.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ken Croswell, author of “Magnificient Universe.”

There were no clear favorites this year, certainly nothing with the clout of Titanic or Shakespeare in Love.

American Beauty – who earned the most nominations with eight – may have been the the only sure bet. In this year’s batch of films, Being John Malkovitch and The Talented Mr. Ripley were also considered favorites, but both fell well short of expectations, but it’s fun to second-guess the Academy.

We’re reviewing the Oscar nominations in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Peter Keough, film critic for the Boston Phoenix and Charlie Taylor, film critic for Salon.com.

It is supposed to be the glory of evolution that species developed without a divine creator or an ultimate purpose-with evolution’s own logic of random variation and selection. But scientific arguments, like species, keep evolving.

It’s a journalist this time, Robert Wright, who is presuming to dress down and stir up some eminent Darwinians, with the argument that evolution isn’t quite random or blind, but has a direction, maybe even a destination.

He makes a point drawn from Game Theory: that what serves survival is not an endless shoot-out between winners and losers, but rather a win-win strategy – an instinct, that is, for sharing information and benefits in the game. Meaning: the playing field in the evolution game has always been tilted to favor complexity, interdependence, social communication-qualities that put humans at the center of cosmic history again.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Wright, journalist and author of “Nonzero”

The Valentine’s Day that Hallmark sells is the sugarcoated, Hollywood version of love. The universal stories of love – spun in literature, verse and film end – in rejection, revenge and ruined lives.

The failed love affairs of Eugene Onegin and Emma Bovary ring more true than Cinderella or Mad About You. Miss Haversham and Heathcliff wreak revenge on the ones that spurned them. Ophelia and Lucia D’Lammermoor go mad from unrequited love.

Love destroys Tess of the d’ubervilles. Hester Prynne is banished when her lover fails to claim her. Jay Gatsby’s love affair with Daisy ruins him. Isabel Archer thought she was marrying for love and instead grew to hate her husband.

Love stinks, love hurts, love is a battlefield, love’s overrated, love is misguided, love’s ephemeral, love is dead, love is blind, love is a sickness.

But then again, everyone knows it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. In this hour of The Connection, we’re talking about the darker side of love.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

What’s in a name, in a brand name, these days?

Naomi Klein believes that the bigger the logo, the less it stands for. Nike doesn’t make those sneakers: its Asian jobbers do; Nike just makes the swoosh – and spends vastly more to advertise it than it spends on the workers who actually stitch the product together.

Tommy Hilfiger doesn’t really make anything: he buys up the jackets, underwear and shoes and by the magic manipulation of an almost meaningless brand, he presents them to white youth hooked on black style, and to black youth hooked on white wealth.

The overdue justice for consumers, as Naomi Klein sees it, is that those puffed up brand names now have second meanings: Microsoft stands for monopoly; Nike and Gap mean sweatshop labor; Starbucks stands for low-pay, part-time work; McDonalds for genetic engineering and environmental damage.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Naomi Klein

The denial of service spree that wiped out the web this week exposed the real vulnerability of the internet.

The simplicity and flexibility of the net is what we love about it. It’s what encourages innovation but it turns out it’s what leaves it open to attacks by hackers, thieves and even terrorists.

And as much as no likes to mess with the firepower of Janet Reno’s Justice Department, it’s hard to find what you can’t see. The cybersabotage began on Monday with an attack against Yahoo then spread to the online brokerage house E*Trade and to the eBay auction site.

The sites were flooded with reams and reams of data and temporarily disabled. Imagine a coordinated network of 10,000 anonymous prank phone callers dialing your phone number over and over. Officials say the DOS attack could be 15 year old kids hacking around or a sophisticated cracker network. We may never know.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Clark, senior research scientist at MIT’s lab for computer science

Mudge and Weld Pond, members of L0pht, a cyber-watchdog group

and Mark Rasch, a computer security consultant and former federal prosecutor.

William Safire seems to have never met a scandal he didn’t like. Not since Watergate, which ruined his old boss Richard Nixon.

As a Pulitzer-Prize New York Times columnist Safire has revealed, and reveled in, the Judith Exner stain on Camelot and all the Clinton pratfalls: Filegate, Monica-gate, and Campaign-Money-from-China-gate. The doctrine is: all the dirt that fits, he’ll print.

It’s the spirit, too, of Bill Safire’s new historical novel about a sort of Matt Drudge among the Founding Fathers. Titled “Scandalmonger,” the novel makes a sort of hero of the real ink-stained wretch James Callender, who wrecked Alexander Hamilton’s political career with a sex-and-money scoop, and tarred Thomas Jefferson with the story of his slave mistress.

Callender was a skunk-the Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg of his time – but his stories were true. Callender went to jail for his insolent abuse: but better the insolence and abusiveness of liberty, he told the judge, than the funereal silence of despotism.

(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Safire, Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist and author of the new book, “Scandalmonger.”