In Europe the question’s considered rude, but in America it’s one of the first things people ask: “What do you do?” That is, “what is your work?”

To which the answer may largely explain: “who are you, anyway?” We talk about our work as our mission in life, our vocation in nearly religious terms. Yet we also talk of work as the curse of our days, with overtones of “take this job and shove it.”

The mixed messages around work get more curiously contradictory as prosperous Americans work harder and longer than they ever have, just when technology and imports should have lightened the load. How is it that instead of spending more time at home and at leisure with family and friends, we’ve made paid work the center of our lives-as we’ve made the work ethic the most righteous of high values.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Joanne Ciulla, author of “The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work”

For most urbanites, an environmentally friendly house brings to mind solar panels and composting toilets. But a green house doesn’t have to be expensive, inconvenient, or overly crunchy.

Building green can be as simple facing your house to the south and planting deciduous trees out front. Greenness comes in little increments. Weather stripping your doors and reglazing your windows gives your home a greenish tinge. Bulking up on insulation or collecting rainwater for your lawn and garden brings you into the leafy range.

Choosing to remodel instead of building afresh makes you downright forest. Our houses are the most polluting things we own, especially if you include the waste from building them.

Building green means cutting down that waste and in the end, a green house saves money while helping to save the planet.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Johnston, from Boulder, Colorado-based “What’s Working,” a company teaching builders how to build green dwellings

and Marc Richmond Powers, from the “Green Builders Project” in Austin, Texas.

The anthropologist, T.M. Luhrmann, set out to observe therapy in this country as neutrally as Margaret Mead saw sex among the Samoans. What she discovered was a conflict in psychiatric cultures in which Woody Allen’s couch sessions with his analyst are numbered.

The discovery of neurotransmitters, serotonin and genetic inheritance has taken the heat off of overbearing mothers and distant fathers, and the advent of managed health care has finally dethroned psychoanalysis as the answer to mental illness.

Its white lab coats and chemical reactions staring down tweed jackets soliciting memories of loss in the competition for the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s psychiatrists. Psychiatrists-in-training increasingly have to choose which camp to be in. T.M. Luhrmann has written a book about how they find their way in this contradictory, confusing culture.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

T.M. Luhrmann

Maybe the real question about the China trade bill that’s got Washington all abuzz is: does it do anything at all?

The Clinton line on the permanent trade agreement says it will open the Middle Kingdom’s gates to democracy, and denying it could mean war. In fact, 3-decades of trade have done little to liberalize China.

US business interests say they’ll reach a billion-plus-person market, but how many Chinese have the cash to buy American-made goods? And the yearly vote for Most Favored Nation status hasn’t done much for Chinese freedom either. And though America will certainly lose jobs to an economically open China, it will lose them whether or not it’s America that does the opening.

Many economists and politicians have long equated globalism with global peace and prosperity, but can we trust the dismal science behind that rosy veiw?

Sorting out China Trade, in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Smith, Director of Policy of the AFL-CIO, and Robert Reich, former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary and Brandeis University professor of economics.

Emily Dickinson might not recognize poetry in the 21st century if she tripped over it.

Poetry today is about performance and slamming. Poets have special lighting and directors! The nation’s foremost slam poet Patricia Smith is among a group of writers making so called poetic theater happen in hip, mostly New York venues like the Knitting Factory and the Nu-yorican Poets Cafe.

Poetic Theater is poetry mixed with monologues and live music; some thread about life, love, or politics ties it all together. Patricia Smith describes it as an attractive medium for people who can’t sit through a straight reading. She’s can’t stage though what she didn’t write, she says.

Maybe even live through. Her first major piece after being fired from The Boston Globe two summers ago was called Professional Suicide. Her new show about the origins of heartbreak is called Blues Through to Bone.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Patricia Smith

Doctor I. King Jordan is deaf and that’s the way he likes it.

That wasn’t always the case. He wasn’t born deaf; he didn’t lose his hearing until a motorcycle accident when he was 21 years old. For years after he struggled with the silence.

He wanted to hear again. He resisted learning to sign. As time went on, though, he discovered a world of soundless culture, a world of deaf poets, actors, and dancers. Sign language itself became a kind of poetry and dance.

Now he feels hearing and sound are over rated. “Deaf people can do anything hearing people can do except hear,” he says. He doesn’t want to go back to a hearing world. And he’s not the only one.

Hundreds of thousands of other deaf people agree. Doctor Jordan is now the first deaf president of the world’s only deaf univesity, if he were a different kind of president he might just say: Read my lips: deaf is cool.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

King Jordan, the first deaf president of Gallaudet University, and Stephen Sachs, who runs Deaf Writers’ Workshops at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles.

To be, virtually, is to blog. Blogging, or making a web log, is tracking your own web journey click by click. A web log at its most basic is a mere collection of links, a massive list of virtual cool sites you’ve seen — a story about a gang of drag queen purse snatchers, interviews with physicist Freeman Dyson, a site full of techie horror tales. But most blogs are a lot more — a personal journal or a new journalism, a publishing house where everyman or woman can rant, share or divulge. Blogs are a daily snapshot of the ever-changing web; they may be the new literature. Like the first museums, the web log is an e-cabinet of wonders, a quirky, human attempt to filter a new mass of information — this time online. On a blog you get E-text of Gogol’s The Overcoat, news of a Japanese foot cult and fun facts about potatoes. So, dump the old website, with its pet photos and family updates. We’re Blogging in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Brad L. Graham, creator of Bradlands.com

Rebecca Blood, creator of Rebeccablood.net

and Evan Williams, CEO And President of Blogger.com.

His name and work will endure through the ages,” is what Karl Marx’s eulogist said to the 10 mourners at Marx’s funeral, in the spring of 1883.

Less than a century later, professed Marxists ruled half the world, and for generations the ideological battles were fought with images of Marx as historical savior, or Marx as materialist anti-Christ.

Karl Marx the man was all paradox and passion: someone who struggled to overthrow the bourgeoisie while throwing extravagant debutante balls for his daughters; a fiery agitator who spent most of his time in quiet study; an earnest philosopher who loved beer, cigars, and good jokes.

Ten years after the defeat of communism, the startling news is that the dismantled bricks and stones of the Berlin wall may have helped uncover the real Marx. Wall Streeters and Economists are finding in Marx the sharpest student of capitalism.

Marx in the age of Globalization — in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Francis Wheen, author of “Karl Marx: A Life.”

Philosophy – denoting a pure love of wisdom and truth-gets puts down in a practical world as the ivory-tower major of kids who expect to stay in college forever, or don’t want to work anyway.

As it’s said mischievously: philosophy teaches you to live without the job it prevents you from getting. Alain de Botton takes that as good news, if philosophy really does come through with comfort and consolation about life itself-as many great names in philosophy thought it should.

Like Epicurus, the Greek philosopher of pleasure, who wrote that “philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind.” Call it feel-good philosophy, if you must, but Alain de Botton reads the masters for pain-relief: Socrates for the misery of unpopularity, Seneca in the frustrations of life, Montaigne when your body lets you down; Schopenhauer for heartbreak.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alain de Botton

On Monday, the Supreme Court took the sting out of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994.

The 5-to-4 ruling struck down a woman’s right to sue rapists and other attackers in federal courts, and it raises all sorts of difficult questions about women’s rights, states’ rights, civil rights, factionalism among the Justices, and the power struggle between Congress and Court.

The Act was passed in 1994 after four years of hearings on states’ failure to treat gender-based violence as seriously as other crimes. The first woman to sue for damages in federal court under the Act was a student at Virginia Tech who claimed she was raped in 1994 by two football players never disciplined by the college.

Her case made its way up to the Supreme Court and met its demise on Monday when the court ruled the Act unconstitutional. The case for and against federal jurisdiction over hate crimes in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charles Fried, Professor at Harvard Law School and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and Diane Rosenfeld