War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death ride in the world’s imagination as the four horsemen of the African apocalypse.

Eritrea and Ethiopia fight each other even as another famine devastates the horn of Africa. Intractable civil wars rage in Angola and Sudan, and political unrest threatens the stability of Zimbabwe. The warring parties have re-joined the battle in Sierra Leone, kidnapping 500 UN Peacekeepers last week, and in the heart of Africa five of the neighbors have become parties in Congo’s civil war.

This is the bad news that has upstaged the promise just a decade ago of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Journalist Scott Peterson has covered the continent’s horror stories: war in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Sudan.

Peterson says there was no unique African weakness at work; there were only the usual suspects to blame: human greed and folly, coupled with the world’s indifference and ignorance.

Africa at war in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Journalist Scott Peterson

What is the most difficult conversation you’ve ever had? Maybe you told your mother you were gay, or told your kids you’re getting divorced.

Perhaps you had to fire an employee? You said “no” to a homeless person. You had to explain to your folks how you cracked up the new car.

Or maybe the most difficult conversation is the one where you admitted you were wrong, or said the other guy was. Some people squirm asking their secretary to make copies. Some people need another shrink to tell their therapist they’re done.

The worst was having to tell a waiter there’s a fly in your soup. You think you know how to confront the tough stuff – but as soon as you open your mouth, you’ve said it all backwards.

If the folks at the Harvard Negotiation Project got you to “yes” – maybe they can get you through asking for a raise. Difficult Conversations – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project

both are instructors at Harvard Law School and co-authors of “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.”

Clay Jenkinson may be the closest thing to Thomas Jefferson since Jefferson himself.

A Rhodes scholar and writer, he impersonates Jefferson on a weekly public radio show, and he’s played Jefferson to Supreme Court justices, the Clinton’s, fifth graders, convicted felons, and Nobel laureates.

Thomas Jefferson was a reluctant president, a lover of fine wine and literature, a meticulous architect and inventor, a prolific writer, and a conflicted slave owner – he encompassed in his vision, actions, and wide-ranging interests much of what makes America American.

This, Jenkinson says, is why Thomas Jefferson is the perfect lens for dissecting contemporary society. Jefferson once wrote: “I know my principles to be pure…they are the same…I am sure, with those of the great body of the American people.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Clay Jenkinson, Jefferson impersonater

Lockerbie trial that’s just begun is a new, judicial model for fighting terrorism.

After 12 years of US-Libyan diplomatic wrangling there’s a blueprint for trying the two Libyans charged with blowing up Pan Am 103: three Scottish Justices will administer British Law on a Dutch airbase that’s been declared Scottish soil, with an Anglo-American prosecution.

It’s an experiment in dealing with the post-Cold War nightmare – terrorism. But it’s a trial of two men – not of the Libyan government or its chief, Colonel Qaddafi whom the US long charged with sponsoring terrorism.

The residents of Lockerbie opened the trial last week by reminding the world of the horror of 1988 when a rain of fire, metal, and jetfuel poured over their village, leveling homes and killing neighbours; and visible in the flames were the mortal remains of all 259 people aboard the plane.

The long aftermath of the Lockerbie Crash, on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Aaron Copland wrote spacious, rhythmic, modern classical music as all-American and nearly as popular as the cowboy, the hoe-down, or the folksong “Campdown Races.”

It’s a long time now since Copland’s greatest hits burst into the repertoire in the nineteen thirties and forties: “Billy the Kid” and “Rodeo” were ballet scores, like “Appalachian Spring” which won a Pulitzer prize in 1944.

“Fanfare for the Common Man” was a symphonic celebration; the “Lincoln Portrait” from 1942 was a patriotic wartime piece that used Lincoln’s words about right, wrong, freedom, tyranny and saving the country.

But at the approach of Copland’s hundredth birthday the persistence of these pieces in concert halls-of a Copland sound in the air-nails his reputation as the composer who caught the ear and the spirit of his country as no other classicist or modernist ever did.

Aaron Copland wrote spacious, rhythmic, modern classical music as all-American and nearly as popular as the cowboy, the hoe-down, or the folksong “Campdown Races.”

It’s a long time now since Copland’s greatest hits burst into the repertoire in the nineteen thirties and forties: “Billy the Kid” and “Rodeo” were ballet scores, like “Appalachian Spring” which won a Pulitzer prize in 1944.

“Fanfare for the Common Man” was a symphonic celebration; the “Lincoln Portrait” from 1942 was a patriotic wartime piece that used Lincoln’s words about right, wrong, freedom, tyranny and saving the country.

But at the approach of Copland’s hundredth birthday the persistence of these pieces in concert halls-of a Copland sound in the air-nails his reputation as the composer who caught the ear and the spirit of his country as no other classicist or modernist ever did.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Maestro Keith Lockhart of the Boston Pops

Testosterone is all the rage in America. A rub-in man-gel is coming this summer, and not since Viagra has the media worked itself into such a lather.

Andro Gel, as this new manhood-in-a-tube will be called, is meant for men who’re genuinely lacking in the big T. But it’s not hard to imagine lines of bikers, body builders, and pro-wrestlers pounding down doctors’ doors all across the nation.

Ravers, boomers, and plenty of others who’ve no pressing problems have sought out Pfizer’s little blue pill just for the fun of it – and Testosterone penetrates a whole lot deeper into the whole question of what it means to be a man than any little Pfizer riser. Andro Gel is the ultimate quick fix for men who want leaner bodies, super cut abs, more energy and a bigger libido.

And what if women take up the Andro Gel habit? Will everyone stop asking directions?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jim Peterson, writer for Playboy and Michael S. Kimmel, sociologist and author of “The Gendered Society,” Dr. Richard Spark author of “Sexual Health for Men.”

Michael Palin thinks of Ernest Hemingway as the greatest travel writer since Homer.

Just the watering holes he wrote about still trade on the memory that Hemingway drank here: Harry’s Bar in Venice, La Floridita in Havana, Sloppy Joe’s in Key West.

Hemingway put Pamplona, Spain and Mt. Kilimanjaro, Kenya on the map of lasting literature – not just as datelines but as incomparable places, in prose that told the truth of first light in Africa. And he got “the remorse and sorrow,” as he said, “the people and the places and how the weather was.”

Since his Monty Python years, Michael Palin has moved on into a remarkably diverse career as an actor/writer and has spent much of the last ten years traveling the world with a camera-in-tow.

After traveling from north to south pole, around the world and even circling the Pacific Rim, Michael Palin decided to follow the adventuring steps of Ernest Hemingway.

And now he wants to talk about the American novelist who changed prose style and men’s image of manhood, and spent all but ten years of his working life outside the United States-in Italy, too, and Paris, the city he loved best in all the world.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Palin

The spindily, little fruit fly, Drosophila Melanogaster, has a brain the size of a pinpoint, but it may be the most important creature in the world at least as far as genetics is concerned.

Drosophila leads a pretty boring life at first glance – it’s got a penchant for lazy floating flight and general hanging about. But biologists have studied Drosophila for nearly two hundred years, and the deeper they look, the more interesting Drosophila becomes.

Turns out, these little pin-headed flies have their own courting ceremonies, sense of time, and ability to learn – and geneticists have been able to link all of those behaviors to particular genes.

Those linkages have a lot to say about the nature versus nurture debate. That may sound like a stretch, but consider this: the gene that governs Drosophila’s internal clock is at work in everything from pond scum to people.

A fly’s eye view on genetics, in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jonathan Weiner, author of Time, Love, Memory : A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior.

Two years into his first term Ronald Reagan, in his own handwriting, added a personal challenge to a drab speech text. To the scientists who’d created A-bombs and H-bombs he said: “give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

The “Star Wars” missile defense echoed a Reagan movie role 40 years earlier: he played an American agent with an “Inertia Projector” that could paralyze enemy planes on approach. Better yet, the Star Wars shield idea hinted at a break from the MAD policy of deterrence.

Mutually Assured Destruction was no defense; just a promise that we’d do to them what they did to us. Star Wars would protect American people, not avenge them. Most of 20 years and some $60-billion dollars later, there’s only one problem with the nuclear umbrella: no one this side of Buck Rogers can imagine how it would work.

Frances Fitzgerald’s chronicle of a defense fantasy (“Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan and Star Wars and the End of the Cold War”) that won’t die in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Frances Fitzgerald

The burp in the Nasdaq a couple of weeks ago might just be the perfect medicine for what’s been ailing Silicon Valley.

That’s Randy Komisar’s hope anyway. He calls himself a virtual CEO. That means he works for himself and has a charismatic way of telling other people what they should do. Others call him a guru and a sage.

That means he sees things they don’t. Randy Komisar says he sees too many entrepreneurs who’ve lost sight of the big idea of the New Economy and too many people who’ve signed up for the Deferred Life Plan. Get Rich Now. Live later.

Komisar is a veteran now of a handful of big California companies like Apple, Claris, and LucasArts Entertainment and he says he learned the lesson the hard way.

Now he’s preaching Buddhism to business people and the parable of the Monk and the Motorcyle.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Randy Komisar, author of “The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur.”