The monologist and self-styled “poetic journalist” Spalding Gray is one of the younger members of the older parent’s club. He’ll turn seventy before his oldest son turns twenty, eighty by the time his youngest hits twenty five.

There are older and more famous members of the older parent’s club: Paul Simon, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty – and author Saul Bellow fathered a child in his eighties. Odd Couple actor Tony Randall sired in his seventies.

Spalding Gray has been through the terrible two’s in his sagging fifties – and he’s got a better than average chance of seeing his boys find gainful employment. Before he gets there, though, he’s got to deal with all the midnight wake-ups, all the tripping over toys, all the carpooling that most people have put past them by the time they’ve reached middle age.

Spalding Gray’s first hand report from the frontlines of fatherhood at fifty is on this hour.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Spalding Gray

When philosopher Peter Singer was appointed Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University it set off a firestorm of protest in the University’s mock tutor precincts that is only just abating.

Singer has courted controversy throughout his professional career by arguing for viewpoints that when summarized seem incredible – animal rights, the voluntary donation of any income you earn over 30,000 dollars to the world’s poor, and the killing of severely deformed infants.

The latter view led the Archbishop of Melbourne to dub Peter Singer “Herod’s Propaganda minister.” The headline grabbing nature of those views obscures the fact that Peter Singer is a true professional philosopher an acknowledged scholar of Utilitarianism, a man who sees himself as applying the theories of John Stuart Mill to contemporary ethical problems.

Difficult issues rigorously analyzed – Ethicist Peter Singer in this hour.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Peter Singer, philosopher.

The world of English comedian Eddie Izzard is, how shall we say, different. It’s a world where real men dress like real women. Izzard is a transvestite. It’s a world where practical ideas rule: why shoot clay pigeons while they are in the air, Izzard wants to know. “They’re much easier to hit once they fall to the ground.”

Izzard is a comedy phenomenon. Just ten years ago he was doing 20 minute sets at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Today he regularly sells out theatres in London and New York, has appeared in films and has an HBO special running, a considerable achievement for a comic whose jokes have no punch-lines and whose main riff is about the difference between being an executive transvestite and a military transvestite.

We’re having a well-rounded discussion with Eddie Izzard about the meaning of life and the perfect color of nail polish to wear while living it.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

English comedian Eddie Izzard.

Robert Kaplan’s beat is bad news and says his editor and guiding spirit is Thomas Hobbes.

Life in most parts of the world, Robert Kaplan is here to tell you, is nasty, brutish and short. Surrounding the global internet economy is global anarchy. Poverty, disease, swelling populations, environmental degradation and a culture of militarized gangsterism are rampant in West Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, Kaplan reports.

And they’re all coming to a country near you. Robert Kaplan’s now famous essay for the Atlantic Monthly called “The Coming Anarchy” argues that the Third World’s current nightmare is the West’s future.

It’s the kind of controversial big bold claim Kaplan likes best. Like the final essay in his newest collection in which says that peace and prosperity may be just be overrated.

Robert Kaplan’s “Coming Anarchy” in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Kaplan

They say about war photographers: If your pictures aren’t good enough. You’re not close enough.

James Nachtwey’s photos are more than good enough – although “good” may not be the most apt adjective for them. Horrifying, disturbing, relentless are much better words to use when talking about Nachtwey.

He is the most honored combat photographer of our time. Throughout this decade of global conflict the photographer has been an eyewitness to horror on our behalf: War, Genocide and Famine in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia among other places.

Along the way he changed in the depths of his soul – once called himself a war photographer, now he says he’s an anti-war photographer.

He has just published his photos from the 1990’s and he wants you to look at them and be changed as well.

James Nachtwey’s photographs of the Inferno in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

James Nachtwey

The Super Tuesday Results are in and it is Hail and Farewell to the challengers: Bill Bradley and John McCain. But the effect of this unusually bloody primary season is likely to last until November.

Vice President Al Gore seems to have re-created himself in fighting off Bill Bradley. George W. Bush and the Republican Party however may have suffered wounds at the hands of John McCain that will not heal in time for Election Day.

But beyond the selection process and the personalities involved the Primary Season has given us a window on the electorate in the year 2000. It’s worth analyzing who the independents were who made John McCain such a thorn in the side of the Republican party establishment.

Will they sit on their hands in November? And as for campaign finance reform: is it an issue whose time will never come?

We’re dissecting Super Tuesday in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Knowledge is power and in no daily situation is knowledge more powerful than in dealing with illness.

Physicians have the knowledge – and they have the power: to chart the course of treatment for you and your loved ones.

Or do they? The world of medical science is changing rapidly and the business structures of medical practice are under pressure.

In a world where medical information is available at the click of a mouse on the world wide web, any patient can challenge his doctor’s view on treating an illness – and one eminent physician actively encourages people to listen to their intuition – and if they feel their doctor is wrong to look to another professional for advice.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dr. Jerome Groopman.

“A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy,” Theodore Roosevelt once said and it seems John McCain couldn’t agree more.

Captain McCain speaks of the warrior bond he shares with Colonel Roosevelt, but it’s McCain’s anti-special interest rhetoric that conjures the memory of the populist reformer who fought the New York political bosses and corporate contributors of a century ago.

The larger than life Roosevelt once said: “Like all Americans I like things big; big prairies, big forests, big factories, and everything else.”

Sometimes ‘everything else’ included big government, odd for a Republican, but TR greatly expanded the role of Federal Government as trust-buster, consumer regulator, and a labor-protector.

And he carried a big stick, of course. He transformed the US Navy into a “Great White Fleet,” secured the land for the Panama Canal, and cemented the Western Hemisphere as America’s backyard.

We’re reviewing the Theodore Roosevelt Century in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Edmund Morris, historian and Roosevelt biographer

Tweed Roosevelt
and E.J. Dione of the Washington Post.

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is a bizarre, turn-of-the-century kidnapping story.

In a mining town on the Mexico-Arizona border in 1904 an angry mob of housewives and a few of their husbands threatened to tar and feather three nuns and a priest who brought 40 Irish Catholic orphans to meet their new adoptive parents. The parents were upstanding, solid, middle class citizens; they were also Mexican immigrants.

The townspeople couldn’t abide so many blonde, white children being handed over to dark-skinned Mexicans. At gunpoint the mob took the children and re-distributed them among the Anglo townswomen.

The kidnapping was upheld by the US Supreme Court which concluded Mexicans should not have “the custody, care and education” of white children.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Linda Gordon

Welcome to nobrow, the new culture zone in America. High brow and low brow are gone along with high culture and low culture.

Nobrow is a megamall, megabucks emporium where everything is hot, fresh and new. And nothing lasts. Culture is marketing, marketing is culture and youth culture rules.

Nobrow is Elton John singing “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Di’s funeral and making a hit record out of it later.

Nobrow is the MTV awards at the Metropolitan Opera. It’s a BMW commercial set to hip hop.

Nobrow is the New Yorker magazine guest edited by Roseanne Barr.

Las Vegas is the capital of “Nobrow Nation” and Times Square is its Eiffel tower. What’s different in Nobrow Nation is that the old arbiters of taste and style are gone and with them the only real class distinctions America ever had.

The culture wars now are the fights over market share. Nobrow – in this hour.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

John Seabrook