New York Times chief movie critic Janet Maslin quit her dream job last year after almost thirty years of reviewing movies. “I didn’t have the mean gene anymore,” she said. Some people might say she wasn’t mean enough, especially to Leonardo di Caprio, Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts.

Janet Maslin stood out among the smart New York critics, especially for her enthusiastic plugs for Titanic, last year’s Star Wars blockbuster and Stanley Kubrick’s posthumous “Eyes Wide Shut.”

She’s just left what may be one of the most influential newspaper jobs in the business, but it came at a price. Four hundred odd movies a year, missing Mothers’ Day every spring to be at the Cannes Film Festival and the relentless corporate marketing coming from the dream factory began to get her down.

She says in her free time, she’ll either go to the movies all the time or never.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Janet Maslin, movie critic

The multi-billion dollar computer and video game market is the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment industry and will soon outstrip Hollywood in the revenue race.

Today’s kids, the children of Americans weaned on Atari, Nintendo, and Sega, are living virtual lives on Sony Playstation, computer games, and web-based games they can play with friends in other countries.

These games draw deep lines in the cultural sand; there’s no question that they’ve changed irrevocably the way children play. If you think computer games are all about blowing people’s heads off, reinforcing gender stereotypes, or creating violent kids, you’re missing out on a world of fantasy, fun, and fine-art.

Alongside the gunfights and hand-to-hand combat are creative worlds that stimulate the imagination, that teach difficult concepts in math and science, and some that are quite simply artforms in themselves.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparitive Media Studies Program at MIT, Eric Zimmerman, cutting edge game designer, and Karen Sideman, Creative Director of The Children’s Television Workshop Online

The electronic music movement was born in the computer labs and universities of downtown New York City and Europe in the late 1940’s. Back then, the only people who performed and grooved to its random electonic blips, bleeps and flutters were engineering and philosophy majors.

Their instruments were tape machines, oscillators, dials and knobs. But over 50 years a quiet revolution has taken the music out of the labs and onto the streets. Rock bands like the Beatles, Genesis, and Led Zepplin were the first to borrow these sounds and take them out of the classical avant-garde scene.

Today, DJ’s, producers, and pop musicians have brought the experimental sound works of pioneers like John Cage and Pierre Schaffer into the techno, jungle, house and illbient clubs all over the world.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Tod Machover, Composer and Director of Hyperinstruments/Opera-of-the-Future Group, MIT Media Lab and Morton Subotnick, one of the world’s premier composers of electronic music.

John McCain, on all the newsmagazine covers now, may be the best story in American politics since another Navy hero Jack Kennedy 40 years ago.

He’s had the best coverage since the “I Like Ike” campaign for General Eisenhower in 1952. But have you got the whole story straight yet: the story of a Vietnam war prisoner’s survival with honor, the story of a conservative Republican with a reform agenda, a candid man who plays politics with pleasure.

It’s the story of a tough little Navy brat known as McNasty in school, and Senator Hothead in the Congress. The story of a maverick who doesn’t much like other mavericks and usually voted the Reagan party line-for tobacco subsidies and school prayer, but not for clean air.

A scourge of campaign money who always had lots of it, and was called the “bought and paid for” prince of the Arizona “interests” when he first went to the Senate.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bill Muller, Reporter from the Arizona Republic, Camille Paglia , Salon Magazine Columnist, and Ed Walsh, Wahington Post Reporter.

William Butler Yeats was the poetic engine of Ireland’s self-discovery in the 20th Century. He breathed new life into the heroic old Celtic myths, then cheered on Irish independence.

On Yeats’ death in 1939, T. S. Eliot declared him “the greatest poet of our times.. in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.” But fashion is fickle about poems and poets.

On this hour, a short course on the great Yeats.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Harvard Professor of English Literature, Helen Vendler.

The specter of Jorg Haider is haunting Europe. The xenophobic Austrian politician who’s Freedom Party has become part of a new Austrian right wing government is a taunting reminder of Europe’s nazi past.

Jorg Haider is a savvy, smooth-talking populist reformer with an anti-immigration, anti-EU message with occasional Nazi revisionist flourishes. He is widely popular in Austria among the working class and the yuppie corporate elite. He denies that he is a Nazi sympathizer, though his own father was a follower of Hitler and his mother belonged to a Nazi youth group.

Like Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s former president with Nazi connections, Jorg Haider is a reminder of Austria’s concealed, dark history of complicity and collaboration with Hitler. And his party’s popularity today speaks to the problem of unifying Europe’s past and future.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Roger Cohen, New York Times Bureau Chief in Berlin and author of “Hearts Grown Brutal”

Andy Makovits, professor of politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan and author of “German Predicament”

and Daniel Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”

In the information economy, where knowledge is currency and wisdom may be worthless, what does the modern citizen need to know? Do you have the ten big ideas you may need for a light cocktail party or a heavy date – or just for life in the 21st Century – at the ready?

The autodidact Chris Rohman has compiled a reference guide of ideas that stretches from Aristotle to Zoroastrianism, from the big bang to the Laffer Curve, from dialectical materialism to post structuralism. It’s a guide to the big thinkers from Foucault to Spinoza, Fromm to Seneca. From Shiites, Sikhs, Sunnis, Sophists and Sufis to field theory, game theory, queer theory and a theory of everything

We’re travelling across a world of ideas in the second hour of The Connection with Chris Rohmann, freelance writer and author of “A World of Ideas: A Dictionary of Important Theories, Concepts, Beliefs, and Thinkers.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Chris Rohmann, freelance writer and author of “A World of Ideas: A Dictionary of Important Theories, Concepts, Beliefs, and Thinkers.”

From the seat of authority in superpower nation, with 348 days to run on William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency, a candid conversation this hour with the man himself: about legacy time in the loneliest job in the world, about the crush of candidates who want it.

Debate pointers for Al Gore, unvarnished answers to the truth-twisting taunts of John McCain. What’s the president’s answer to Clinton fatigue, to Bill Bradley’s baiting?

His take on Alpha males and earth-tone shirts? His last word on the little devil in the blue dress? Or is presidential attention riveted now on the first lady Hillary’s plunge in New York? the new digs and green fairways in Westchester County?

Is Campaign 2000 all about his economy, his values, about him, in a word?

Straight talk with the Comeback Kid, with the bridge-builder to the century we’re already in.

(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Political impressionist Jim Morris

Christopher Ricks’ reconstitution of the canonical Oxford Book of English Verse begins with the anonymous medieval cuckoo song, “Sumer is icumen in” and ends with the Irishman Seamus Heaney’s celebration of “The Pitchfork:

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain
The springiness, the clip and dart of it.”

From seven centuries between those two, Ricks has chosen for a desert island or your night table his touchstone poems defining the truly excellent: the great Shakespeare dramatic speeches as well as the sonnets, limericks and nursery rhymes as well as the great love lyrics.

Anthologies like this are where most of us meet our poets and learn our poetry. But collections like the Oxford are also arenas for fierce fights: in the Ricks case: why so much Kipling, so little Yeats? Don’t Americans write English verse?

Among living moderns, is Ricks picking classics or playing favorites? The new Oxford English Verse in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Christopher Ricks

John McCain’s insurgency is gaining after his New Hampshire upset, and so is the idea that George W. Bush, the annointed republican emperor-in-waiting has no clothes.

McCain’s Straight Talk Express pulled into South Carolina with a message for alienated voters and for the party establishment too: the choice is between character and experience or big money and political endorsements.

Four years ago the republican king-makers stifled the lock-and-loader Pat Buchanan after the New Hampshire primary and gave the ball to Bob Dole. This time around they loaded George W.’s coffers early and created the inevitability candidate who now looks quite “evitable” at the end of New Hampshire week?

How does a party answer a populist uprising against its own social conservatives and corporate friends?

The McCain Insurgency – in the first hour of The Connection .
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Brooks, senior editor at the Weekly Standard and Alan Wolfe sociologist at Boston University.