Wall Street is bracing for another stock stampede today. Last week’s quake in the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones which cost investors 2 trillion dollars has spooked this red hot market.

The question for the crystal ball is – is it a healthy correction to an irrational, volatile economy or the beginning of the end of the longest bull market in history? Lots of Silicon Valley tycoons woke up this weekend with worthless stock options and the sudden realization that they can’t retire before they turn 30.

And millions of other Americans who play the stock market game lost a healthy chunk of change too. The remarkable thing about this market for months now has been that every stumble turns into a surge. So with record prosperity, a growing work force and a technological revolution in the works, will a new nervousness on Wall Street spark a wave of bargain hunting, a rash or fence sitting or worse?

Pre-Panic on Wall Street – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The musical arrangements that came to stand for perfection in swing were called “head arrangements” because they arrived, unwritten, out of Count Basie’s head, on the bandstand.

As his trombonist Dickie Wells explained: Count Basie would start out at the piano, vamp a little, set a tempo and say ‘that’s it.’

First the saxophones would pick up the rhythm; the trombones would enter on another motif; then the trumpets on a pulse of their own, and the band was off and running, “sixteen men swinging,” as they said of the Basie band, with a muscular but supple propulsive irresistibly danceable energy that defined the Swing Era of the 1930s.

In the year 2000, this is the stuff of a huge Harvard lecture course, with the classical pianist and Mozart specialist Robert Levin.

On its variety of virtuosic voices, on rhapsodic invention in rhythm and melody under pressure, the Robert Levin short course on Swing music in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Levin, pianist and professor at Harvard College, and John Hendricks, of The trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.

In a world with a lot of questions about free trade, US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky is the woman with Bill Clinton’s answer.

Her job is to persuade the doubters that free and open trade is the road not only to prosperity but democracy.

Barshefsky is known as a tough as nails negotiator, famous for her going without sleep for days at a time, for her knowledge of the fine print, and for her governing sense of the big picture. She’s laughed out loud at Japan’s minister of finance, blasted American business interests, and forged the biggest deal with China since the Open Door.

But the constituency she needs to win over now isn’t across the negotiating table, it’s in her own back yard: all those labor leaders, environmentalists, human rights activists, and anyone else who doesn’t buy the free trade evangelism of the Clinton administration.

Trading talk with Charlene Barshefsky in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlene Barshefsky

There’s a new message being offered to ghetto kids in America. Becoming a basketball star isn’t the way up and out of poverty, owning and running your own business is.

Could entrepreneurship be the real hoop dream for the internet age and for a red hot economy? Kids from tough neighborhoods may be just right for the rough and tumble world of competition and the bottom line.

If they’ve got chutzpah; if they’re not afraid to take risks, if they’re desperate to improve their lives, they’re like a lot of great entrepreneurs already.

Steve Mariotti has been teaching inner city kids business skills for two decades and he says it’s not about business knowledge; it’s about motivation. Show him a kid with low test scores who’s in trouble and Steve Mariotti says he will show you the next Bill Gates.

The new entrepreneurs in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Steve Mariotti and Richard Futtrell, a graduate of Mariotti’s NFTE program and CEO/President of Futtrell Promotions.

The tipping point, in Malcolm Gladwell’s formula, is the moment when a notion becomes a fad, when a trend becomes a phenomenon, when a curiously small change has a very big effect.

When, for example, frumpy footwear from the ’50s and ’60s, Hush Puppies, come back as a 90s rage. When rising street crime drives all social life indoors-or when falling street crime, as in Brooklyn recently, prompts a sudden revival of stickball and bicycle traffic and stoop sitting. When retail sales of cheap fax machines, or cell phones, rocket into the millions.

When an idea becomes infectious, like a yawn, or like a virus. Malcolm Gladwell’s question is why some ideas, some behaviors, too, become epidemics. His answers-the kind of social commentary that has made Malcolm Gladwell something of a phenomenon-turn on what he calls the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Conext.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.”

Fred Leuchter is a humanitarian. He wants to take the discomfort out of execution.

He’s an engineer from Malden, Massachusetts who’s devoted his life to making the most efficient and painless electric chair. Fred Leuchter says “if you’re going to fry people, isn’t it better that their eyeballs don’t fly across the room and hit the wall?”

He’s a perfect subject for the filmmaker Errol Morris. He’s peculiar. He’s obsessively eccentric. He’s pre-occupied with death. If Fred Leuchter hadn’t got involved with some Neo Nazi Holocaust deniers, he might have prospered in his day job as an execution specialist.

Instead, he took his new bride to Auschwitz and spent his honeymoon poking around the rubble of the gas chambers, looking for traces of cyanide gas. He didn’t find any and issued the Leuchter Report which has become the standard bible now for Holocaust deniers.

We’re having a conversation with Errol Morris and his film “Mr. Death” in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Errol Morris

Henry A. Wallace is a forgotten figure in American history.

He’s remembered mostly as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime vice president who was dumped from the ticket at the beginning of FDR’s fourth term in favor of Harry S Truman. But he was also the best agriculture secretary the country has ever had and a primary engineer of the New Deal who became the voice of liberalism and a champion of the common man.

He’s remembered too as a Soviet apologist and even a traitor for his independent campaign against the Cold War and racial segregation.

His bigorapher and fellow Iowan Senator John Culver has rehabilitated and revived Henry Wallace though and maybe even restored him to his rightful place in history too. John Culver says he was a visionary and his life a study in an American road not taken.

Henry Wallace the American Dreamer – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Senator John Culver

The question broke out in a public debate on the politically-correct Swarthmore College campus in the 1990s – and now it comes up around every performance of J. S. Bach’s incomparable melodramas on the death of Jesus.

In those musical passion plays drawn from the gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, the question becomes: what did it mean to Bach-what should it mean to us?-that the angry mob shouting “crucify him, crucify him,” is named, quite insistently, as “the Jews.”

The Swarthmore students protested what they felt was more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in the text – no matter that the suffering victim in the crucifixion was just as Jewish as the mob.

So who is guilty? Who is exempt? Who is involved in the death of Jesus, in the telling of St. John’s Gospel, in Martin Luther’s German translation of it, in the commentaries of Johann Sebastian Bach in both music and text?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Julian Wachner

Think towers – Trump Tower, Eiffel Tower, Tower of London, Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Towers are our lookouts and our landmarks, the architectural expression of perspective – and perspective’s exactly what Bill Henderson needed when he decided to build one. He’d hit his midlife crisis and found himself faithless and suffering vertigo.

Henderson says he built his for no reason, but a tower did make a kind of subterranean sense. Towers form a first line of defense – as in the fire towers in the American wilderness or the watchtowers built along China’s Great Wall – and a last stand, as in Ireland’s Round Towers which kept safe the written treasures of Western Civilization.

A tower is a kind of cure for a faithless man, too – the Muslim call to prayer comes from the minaret, the church bells from the steeple, even the Tower of Babel stands for man’s overreaching desire to reach God.

What Henderson found in fighting his fear of heights is that hard work can heal. Invoking a higher tower in the first hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bill Henderson author of “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction.”

The new backlash against Prozac and its anti-depressant cousins Zoloft, Paxil, Lovox and Celexa may be more than just another round of pharmacophobia, fixed on the serotonin boosters so phenomenally popular in our Pharmacy Nation.

Dr. Joseph Glenmullen’s anthology of side-effects stories could give you pause. Loss of libido, sexual dysfunction, is a price some people are ready to pay for relief from depression; but what about facial tics and memory loss; some patients report a Parkinsonian stiffening all over, others a manic caffeine sort of high.

After a decade of Prozac, Dr. Glenmullen says the seratonin boosters have hit the ten year start of the same ten-year disenchantment cycle that hit cocaine elixirs a century ago and some famous tranquilizers more recently.

Fluoxetine (Prozac) Side Effects
Agitation, anxiety, trouble sleeping, sleepiness, tremor, loss of appetite, nausea, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, delayed orgasm.

Get ready for a lot of bad news about Prozac, he’s telling us: and wake up to the old-fashioned alternative treatments that are better.

We’re treating depression in the second hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dr. Joseph Glenmullen