Fine cooking has been an art form for centuries, lorded over by temperamental chefs and marked by an ever-shifting palate of tastes, but it turns out it’s a hard science, too. Whether it’s silky hollandaise sauce you’re after, or perfectly roasted pork, a smattering of high school chemistry and physics can make you the Madame Curie of Cuisine.

Cooking isn’t just about new flavor combinations and eye-catching presentation; it’s also about heat, protein structure, acid-base reactions. It turns out you CAN overcook water for tea, and it’s probably because the water becomes less acidic the more you boil it. If your cakes fall flat, you might be tempted to add more leavening, but a chemist would tell you that could be just the WRONG thing to do. A little science can explain why onions make you cry, how to cook cabbage without the sulphury smell, or why over-steamed green beans turn brown.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Chris Kimball, editor in chief of “Cooks Illustrated.”

Thinking about Justice, the Greek philosopher Aristotle writes “it is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, others are by nature slaves, and for [them], the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.”

Aristotle’s defense of slavery is no more startling than the just society imagined by his teacher Plato. Plato’s Republic sounds like the old Soviet Union: with complete government control of writers and artists, no elections, no free speech, and no chance to move up for most of the population.

The cry for justice may be universal, but can there be a definition of Justice that is universal? Affirmative Action was established in the name of justice, but many people think it’s unjust. Most Americans think the death penalty is just; most Europeans think it’s not just unjust but barbaric. How does philosophy answer the call of justice, and can there be one answer?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University
Bernard Williams, Professor of Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford.

Andres Segovia once described his guitar as a small orchestra, every string a different color. When the trumpeter Ruby Braff first heard Louis Armstong play “Sleepytime Down South,” he said “the room turned orange.” Duke Ellington described music in terms of images, pictures, and scenes.

Musical styles have long been associated with color. Some musicians, though, associate specific pieces of art with sound. When jazz pianist Dan Knight performs live, he wants his audience to see as well as hear his composition, so he starts with a description of a work of art, like Matisse’s “Blue Interior,” Jackson Pollack’s “Portrait of H.M,” or Joan Miro’s “A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb.”

And then he plays it as he sees it& The Key of D is yellow, the Key of C white, the key of G blue. Can you see it when you hear it? Can you hear it when you see it?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dan Knight, jazz musician.

Reading Harold Bloom on how to read is like reading a self help manual by a strict schoolmaster. Read. Read deeply. Read alone. Read Shakespeare. Read Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens and Proust.

Bloom is strict about his lifelong passion. Reading aloud is not what it was like in Victorian times, he says. The destiny of the novel is foggy. Don’t read short stories for wise sayings or parables. Read them for the pleasure of closure. Don’t read Edgar Allan Poe. Read Chekov, Borges, Hemingway and Henry James. Don’t read poetry, memorize poetry. Start with Tennyson’s Ulysses. Then Whitman, Dickinson and Milton.

Read Don Quixote. Read Pride and Prejudice. Read Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment and Moby Dick. Read to find yourself. Read to experience the difficult pleasure of the sublime. Then re-read it all. The Bloomian tutorial on reading.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Harold Bloom, Professor of English at Harvard University

The Christian West and the Muslim Middle East have been neighbours at love and war for more than a thousand years. In the process both civilizations have armed themselves with prejudice, ignorance, suspicion, and sometimes insight.

The vicious cycle of Crusade and Jihad has been a millennial struggle for control of the Mediterranean and then of the world. At the start of the race, a handicapper looking at the technological achievement and intellectual self confidence of Cairo and Damascus would surely have bet on the East.

What the eminent historian Bernard Lewis sees over the long pull is not just the contention, but the interpenetration of two cultures: the sharing of the patriarch Abraham, the philosophical systems of Aristotle, and oil in the modern day. Behind their slogans about great Satan and ours about Saddam Hussein as Hitler, Bernard Lewis discusses the real history.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bernard Lewis, Middle Eastern historian.

Dan Quayle has earned the modern distinction of making the Bartlett’s Book of Famous Quotations. “What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all,” he told the United Negro College Fund in 1989.
The campaign trail is littered with political bloopers and malapropisms. Al Gore’s latest makeover was overshadowed in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last week when he got a local legislator’s name wrong.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s tongue twisters are renown around Boston. When he became acting mayor Menino announced he was embarking on a period of “transmission.” He told principals to install “mental” detectors in schools. And he called a shortage of parking spaces in the city an Alcatraz around his neck.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.” And so it’s not.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Author Richard Lederer

The usual literary titans as well as a new crop of young scribblers top the summer reading list 2000. In The Human Stain Philip Roth turned his disgust over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal into a rant about American PC-ness and overzealous morality, while Saul Bellow eulogized his late friend, the cultural critic Alan Bloom, in his controversial new novel, Ravelstein. Michael Ondatje returned to his homeland, Sri Lanka, and the result is a haunting tale of love and loss in Anil’s Ghost.

In two new fictional biographies, Joyce Carol Oates got inside Marilyn Monroe’s head, while Anchee Min figured out what it was like to be Madame Mao. Some of the hot new literary voices are Zadie Smith from London and Dave Eggers from New York. For laughs, David Sedaris moved to Paris just so he could write a book poking fun at the French. And guess what, the 4th Harry Potter book is on its way.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ron Charles, book editor of Christian Science Monitor

Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant’s House.

Too bad, you say, that Monica Lewinsky couldn’t protect her email privacy — even for messages that she’d drafted but never sent to President Clinton, or anyone else. Too bad that the old skirt-chaser in the Senate, Bob Packwood, couldn’t keep the silliest musings in his personal diary out of the Washington Post.

Too bad but not threatening, you say, because you don’t run with politicians; you’re not a public figure. Then what about magazine writer Celia Farber, whose boss got sued for sexual harrassment: the other women in the office were only witnesses, not defendants; but the burden fell on them to prove with datebooks and diaries and defensive testimony that their by-lines and promotions had not been won with sexual favors.

Could you enforce, in a pinch, your constitutional right to be let alone? From drug testing? From sexual outing? From publication? Should we have read all those Nixon tapes?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jeffrey Rosen, Professor at George Washington University and author of The Unwanted Gaze, talks about the legal erosion of privacy.

Paul Theroux practices a solitary, sedentary trade: writing, mostly novels: “Chicago Loop” among them, and “Mosquito Coast.” Yet the quiet writer in the small room with the door closed has always wanted to see himself as a man in motion too, as a time-traveler on ancient coal-and-steam choo-choo trains in China, or a kayak paddler reliving David Livingstone’s discovery of Victoria Falls, “the smoke that roars,” on the Zambezi River in Central Africa.

Paul Theroux insists it was feeling like an outsider since boyhood that made him a hiker and camper, then a traveler; and it was being a traveler that made him a writer; experiencing otherness to the limit, and in the completely foreign cultures of Asia and Africa, learning to live in his own head, retrieving memory, taking heart.

“You want to be a writer?” he asks, and answers: “Leave home.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Writer Paul Theroux

When Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il held hands, beamed, and downed champagne last week over the future of Korea, the world hoped the last theatre of the Cold War might be disappearing forever. Kim Jong Il, long portrayed as a paranoid, hard-drinking blend of Saddam Hussein and Hugh Hefner, showed himself capable of warmth and humour; and South Koreans, riveted to their TV screens, wept and clapped.

Washington, though, hotly divided over North Korea’s real motives, refuses to shelve plans for its missile defense shield. Officials can’t seem to agree whether the Kims’ summit signalled a real change of heart in North Korea, or whether it’s all a subtle ploy of Kim Jong Il’s to extract aid from former enemies. His country, after all, is staggering through catastrophic famine and a debilitating economic crisis, yet Washington claims he’s still furiously developing long-range missiles.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Kang, Professor of Government at Dartmouth

Bonnie Oh, Professor of Korean Studies at Georgetown University

Steve Linton, former Professor in Korean history at Columbia and head of an aid organization in Seoul

and Mike Breen, long-time Korea expert and author of The Koreans.