From Tolstoy to Norman Mailer, famous writers have made infamous husbands. But perhaps the greatest writer of his time, Vladimir Nabokov, is the great exception. He was the most married man in literature since Robert Browning met Elizabeth Barrett; his wife Vera Slonim Nabokov makes a great story on her own — all the more because she was inseparable from him.

Russian born as he was, Vera met Nabokov in Berlin in the twenties, migrated with him through France in the 30s to the US in the 40s. She was not just his muse, guardian, editor and translator; not just the lecturer’s assistant, note-taker and marker of student papers when Nabokov taught at Wellesley and Cornell; not just the woman who saved his Lolita manuscript. Beyond all of this, she was part of his conjuring career, in which the marriage along with the books was a work of high art.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Biographer Stacy Schiff

Africa has roughly 80 percent of the HIV/AIDS infections in the world, on top of older plagues like malaria, sleeping sickness and river blindness. But it gets barely one percent of the world’s modern drugs for treatment. The value of all the medical drugs delivered in Africa is about the same sum that the pharmaceutical industry spends on advertising its wares in the United States.

This is the abysmal gap between crisis and cure in capitalistic medicine — a crisis that only lately has commanded page-one and political attention and may be shaming the drug industry into a new course of action. President Clinton and the drug companies have just begun to knock the price down on AIDS drugs, for example. Still to be built is a delivery system for the third world. Still to be developed are modern remedies for diseases in the impoverished tropics that it hasn’t been profitable to cure.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Richard Laing, Professor of Public Health at Boston University

Daniel Berman of Doctors without Borders

Tom Bombelles of Merck Pharmaceuticals.

Early in his career writer George Saunders filled notebook after notebook with ideas on how to make more money, how to live in a nicer place, and how to get beyond never having enough. The theme of work became dominant in his writing – and there are few happy endings, let alone straight ahead characters.

His short stories are filled with mistreated employees and villainous CEOs. He writes about a sort of corruption at the heart of corporate culture, and parodies the elliptical language of “memos from the management.” George Orwell called it meaningless words and pretentious diction. Worse maybe in George Saunders’ world is meaningless activities like filling out daily partner performance evaluation forms or DPPEFs, and pretentious questions like, “are there any Situations (capital “s”) that require Mediation (capital “m”).

The writer George Saunders assails the American workplace.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

George Saunders

Sports may be the nearest thing in Cuba to a national religion. Fidel Castro names sports as a Right of the People, but you won’t see a logo-ridden baseball cap or shirt on anyone in the street. Big money never enters the equation, so athletes compete for sheer love of the game.

Excellence in sports has been a pillar of Fidel Castro’s regime since the revolution, and it’s perhaps the only remaining element with its old vitality. Cuba consistently produces outstanding baseball players, boxers, and track-stars who have become poster-children for Castro’s brand of communism.

But in Cuba’s climate of withering poverty, where even brain surgeons rely on tourist dollars from second jobs, the lure of capitalist-driven sports is strong. In the last decade more than 100 world-class athletes have defected from Cuba and been erased forever from the country’s official memory.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mention the Tango and immediately the image of a handsome man in a tux and tails leading an elegant, passive woman with a single red rose in her teeth comes to mind.

The tango began in the brothels of 1880s Buenos Aires and the early dance was full of sexuality, the music was both sorrowful and celebratory. High Class Argentinian Society would have nothing to do with it until the 1920s when the French lead the way on the dance floor.

Juan and Evita Peron loved the tango, but later dictators and the popularity of 1950s Rock and Roll put it into deep hibernation. Today, the Tango is definitely back.

Musicians like Astor Piazzola and Claudio Ragazzi have modernized the sound. In the late 90s movies like Shall we Dance and Strictly Ballroom, and a smash broadway hit “Forever Tango” helped re-popularize it. Wanna-be Tango dancers have been flocking to studios to learn the graceful ways of seduction and chivalry.

Care to dance?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Astor Piazzola and Claudio Ragazzi

TV’s classic, “The Untouchables” about Chicago gangsters and Federal cops in the Capone days, was rewritten in Boston in the 1970s and 80s.

The untouchables this time were not the incorruptible Feds. The guys that couldn’t be reached were the Bulger gang of licensed killers, loan sharks, extortionists and drug racketeers who were above the law because the Federal cops put them there. The notorious Whitey Bulger has been free, on the run, since 1995 because his FBI handler tipped him off in time to escape.

It’s the FBI man, John Connally, who’s under indictment now for a career of aiding and abetting the Bulger rackets. He did it, Connally says, in the cause of getting information from Bulger about the Italian Mafia that used to run crime around town.

Writers Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil call it a “devil’s deal” that made the FBI’s worst scandal and made a monster of Whitey Bulger.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil

At the roof of the world, Tibet, with depths of sky framing rugged, remote mountains, with its ornate monasteries and Buddhist rituals, has held a kind of mythic place in the Western imagination as far back as Marco Polo.

As a glamourised, Hollywood Shangri-La, fought for by the likes of Sharon Stone and Richard Gere, it may be a projection of our yearning for simplicity, purity, and spiritual fulfillment. Tibet in real life, meantime, has TVs, SUVs, and a history of a powerful feudal theocracy and religious factionalism.

It’s a country and culture living on borrowed time – both literally and figuratively: Tibet runs on the same clock as Beijing, its roughshod ruler 2000 miles away.

The American special feeling for the old Tibet wasn’t special enough to protect it in our rush to do business with China: so what is Shangri-la’s future after the Hollywood romance and the US-China trade agreement.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Orville Schell

The quantifiers of contentment in America say that boom times or not, America just isn’t that happy.

The social scientists say, it’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s child poverty, affordable housing, crime, and access to health care. The well-being watchers use stats like those to assess how good we feel; they call the sum a social index.

But a social index can use all kinds of indicators. Arch-conservative Bill Bennett’s index, for instance, gives great weight to divorce rates, births out of wedlock, and church attendance.

Tuscon plans to count the number of pedestrians because people feel safer and happier when there are other people on the street.

Traverse City Michigan tracks of bird and frog species; the people are happy if the Great Lake is healthy, the reasoning goes.

So how do you gauge your contentment? In good food or junk food, movie time or work out time – your social index in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alan Wolfe and Juliet Schor.

Southern Lebanon has been Israel’s Vietnam, not half a world away but on its northern border.

Since Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, the war with Hezbollah guerrillas has been indecisive in the field and unpopular at home. Nine hundred Israeli soldiers and thousands of Lebanese civilians died.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese families lost their homes. So it was with tumultuously mixed feelings of anger, relief, humiliation and anxiety that people watched the chaotic television images of withdrawing Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah men up from the underground with flags and guns.

A newswoman said on Lebanese state television “there is only one headline in Lebanon tonight: the slinking, servile withdrawal by Israel.”

Southern Lebanon was the last active front in the Arab-Israeli wars, and ending the fighting there is meant to be a key part of the final peace in the Middle East.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Richard Norton, Boston University anthropologist and International Relations professor, UN observer when the Israeli occupation first began, and author of “Hezballoh of Lebanon: Extremist Ideals vs. Mundane Politics.” Also, Roger Owen, head of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies.

The earth may not be at the center of the universe, but we may be the only ones who know it.

According to Dr. Peter Ward, a geologist at the University of Washington, bacteria probably hold pride of place as the most intelligent life out there in the cosmos. Which might explain why, after 40 years of listening for extraterrestrial signals, we haven’t heard a thing.

If the theory is true, it shatters Carl Sagan’s fond belief that brainy aliens exist in millions of flavors. For hard-core Trekkies it might just spell the end of the world.

Try to imagine life without our fine green friends: no more close encounters of the third kind; forget Sunday nights in front of the X Files; your Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would be useless; and you’d never have the chance to share Reeses Pieces with E.T.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dr. Peter Ward, a geologist at the University of Washington