All the world’s a stage, Shakespeare said, including all the corporate corridors and business boardrooms that account for so much of the drama of modern life.

The Shakespeare director Tina Packer and the takeover-and-turnaround management specialist John Whitney say: there’s more bottom line wisdom in the Shakespeare plays than in those typical B-school case studies. CEOs: learn the lesson of Othello’s failure when he passed up Iago for promotion: and pay close attention to the dynamics of your team. Middle managers on the rise: keep in mind the ill fated Richard the Second — who learned too late that power does not beget power.

Study Henry the Fourth, who had a strategy for being king, not just acting like he had a divine right to be the boss. Start-up dreamers, remember Hamlet’s line: “The readiness is all.” Stop shifting your paradigm and brush up on your Bard.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Tina Packer, Founder, President, and Artistic Director, Shakespeare and Company

John O. Whitney, Professor of Management, Columbia Business School.

Books, as we know and love them, may be headed the way of vinyl records. Last week Stephen King horrified his publisher Simon & Schuster by posting his newest novel The Plant online.

“My friends,” King writes on his website, “We have a chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare.”

So far about 40,000 fans have pointed, clicked, and downloaded the first chapter of The Plant, and King hopes to collect a dollar from each by threatening to stop posting it if the mass of readers don’t pay up. Simon & Schuster doesn’t get a dime.

Most authors don’t command a King-size audience, but “e-publishing” offers writers new channels of distribution and a potential worldwide audience online. What does it offer readers besides the job of wading through unsorted and unedited e-texts? Could E-books do to the publishing industry what MP3s are doing to the music business? The E-volution of E-publishing.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

M. J. Rose, an e-published author and journalist for Wired.com

Chris McCaskill, CEO of Mightywords.com in Silicon Valley

Carol Fitzgerald, founder/president, Bookreporter.com, a site from The Book Report Network

and Jonathan Karp, publisher of @random, the online magazine of Random House.

You have a few more hours to get free songs on Napster, music fans. This week a federal judge agreed with the record industry’s lawsuit and ordered the controversial online music service to shut down its servers by midnight tonight.

The labels are declaring victory, but they must also wonder if the future belongs to more-or-less anonymous “peer-to-peer” computing from Napster successors like Gnutella and Freenet. “Information wants to be free,” the cyber libertarians like to say.

The labels were caught unprepared for the MP3 revolution, may indeed be fighting a losing battle for the control of the uncontrollable. Maybe they should have just bought Napster, instead of putting it out of business. The free music cat’s out of the bag, and the artists, who still want to get paid but hate the old label system, are left holding it.

We’re measuring the Napster decision’s effect on the music biz, the net, and your intellectual property… Napster unplugged.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ric Dube, analyst at Webnoize.com, an internet entertainment research company

recording artist Aimee Mann.

The Middle East peace process may be unsinkable after all. Talks resume in Jerusalem on Sunday — talks that broke off at Camp David but maybe didn’t break down.

It’s an irony, maybe an obstacle, that the Palestinian Yasir Arafat, the bad guy at Camp David on President Clinton’s scorecard, went home to a hero’s welcome on the Gaza Strip. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak, by contrast, looked magnanimous at Camp David but is under pressure in Israel. He had a broken Knesset coalition before Camp David, and has more explaining to do now about why he put a share of sovereignty over Jerusalem on the table, even if Arafat didn’t grab it.

The next move may be Arafat’s, well before his threat of a September 13 declaration of Palestinian statehood. Adamant against a half-loaf in Jerusalem, he’s nonetheless eager to talk… about something.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Hanan Ashrawi, spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation

Yoram Peri, former spokesperson for Yitzak Rabin and Professor of Politics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Linda Greenlaw is a minor character in the best selling book that became this summer’s blockbuster hit, The Perfect Storm. She’s the captain of the swordfish boat The Hanna Boden, and in the movie is played by the actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

She can talk fish, weather, navigation, tide charts, lunar cycles, feeding beds, spawning cycles — you name it — with the best of ‘em. She’s tough, she’s tanned, she’s tenacious. The only female captain in the machismo world of swordfishing, Greenlaw beat the guys at their own game.

She kept her crew in line, caught more fish and earned more money than anybody else on the East Coast. And she was also the voice of reason during the 1991 no-name storm of the century. Greenlaw kept her boat 500 miles east of the hurricane’s eye and warned Captain Billy Tyne to do the same. She lived to tell her story.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Linda Greenlaw, author of The Hungry Ocean

On this hour, the summer philosophy series continues with the philosophy of science. Does science supplant religion, literature and philosophy as the path to truth?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Before the Camp David talks broke down yesterday, maybe the real point is that the Israeli, Palestinian and American chiefs got to depths and details they’d never approached before — with candor and concreteness about the final deal they couldn’t reach.

The cheerful possibility about the grim failure of all that head butting — President Clinton called it dentistry without novicaine — is that they have all now seen and smelled, virtually tasted, one multi-dimensional resolution of their conflict; and that having come so close they can’t but go back and build it.

In the meantime, however, the stubborn Yasir Arafat is a hero on the West Bank for rejecting the deal. Prime Minister Barak is a hero in President Clinton’s eyes for thinking “out of the box,” especially about shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, and still his coalition in Israel is in ruins. The peace process as we have known it for seven years is over.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Who are you when your memory disappears? When you forget overnight that you’re a Democrat who hates bagels and loves Agatha Christie?

Can you love without memory? Or hate? Can you be funny? Does personality remember who to be, how to be, on its own? Can a strong new present reconstruct your past?

These were some of Jill Robinson’s questions when her memory drew a blank ten years ago. She was a writer, a chronicler of Hollywood whose father, Dore Schary, had run the MGM studio in the 1950s. She was living in London when her memory went out like a light and her doctors said she’d never write again.

She knew there was something she liked about the man in her arms, but she didn’t remember marrying him. As she rebuilt her memory like a muscle, he held on with devotion.

“How many couples get to begin again?” He asked
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jill Robinson, author of Past Forgetting

Margot Livesey, author of the novel The Missing World.

Lyme Disease is a modern affliction from a truly ancient bug. It’s a misery of aches, depression and paralysis that’s picked up at the ritziest summer addresses, like Lyme, Connecticut on Long Island Sound and Nantucket Island, off Massachusetts.

There are truly disgusting details in the story of Lyme Disease — especially in the blood-sucking habits of the tiny saw-toothed ticks that carry the infectious bacteria in their saliva. But as the psychoanalyst Arno Karlen tells the tale, there’s also a representative fragment here of the universal history of life — and especially of the alliances that organisms make.

The Lyme Disease bug lives in ticks that 300 million years ago fed on dinosaurs and now live on whitefoot mice and white-tailed deer that are repopulating the suburban woodlands of New England and the far west. It’s human development, Dr. Karlen says, that’s revived a microbe that will doubtless outlast us.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arno Karlen, psychoanalyst and author of Biography of a Germ

Dr. John Marr, New York Medical College.

The Middle East principals at Camp David haven’t reached the end of their road, but they can see it plainly and put a name on it: it’s the question of sovereignty over the holy city of Jerusalem — the divided capital of the monotheistic world.

It is the city where the Jews of the Old Testament returned from captivity in Babylon and rebuilt their great temple; the city where Jesus Christ carried the cross to his death on Calvary Hill; the city where the prophet Muhammed preached in the 7th Century; from which he ascended into heaven.

So Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims around the world, kindred people of the book; but it’s the very point where ecumenical slogans break down, where the spiritual becomes territorial, where fundamentalism and fanaticism flourish, and symbolism can trump common sense.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Karen Armstrong, author of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

Charles Sennott, Boston Globe correspondent in Jerusalem.