The African rite of passage is a stunning sight in the global 21st century. The Ndebele Nubility rite, Taneka initiation, the Swazi Reed dance, the Dogon Dama Funeral are all elaborate tribal customs marking passages from birth to maturity, courtship and marriage and finally into death.

Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher have spent ten years making a visual and musical record of a vanishing Africa. They’ve captured the coronation of the Kabaka, the king of the Baganda tribe; the initiation rites of young Massai boys hunting lions with spears; the seasonal cattle crossings by Fulani herdsmen across the Niger river; the bridal rituals of the Wodaabe brides who are covered with blankets and hidden in the bush throughout their wedding ceremony.

The art of it, the living history and craftsmanship make you wonder what the American prom night could aspire to.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher.

The Hammond B3 organ wizard Jimmy McGriff and alto saxophonist Hank Crawford are soul survivors. They rescued soul jazz music from the fate of oldies stations, nostalgia reunion tours and dusty vinyl records fifteen years ago.

James Harrell McGriff was a cop in Philadelphia — the Hammond B3 capital of the world – before he started moonlighting in a blues club and studying the organ. Hank Crawford was Ray Charles’ baritone sax player years and backed up B.B. King and Ike Turner and Bobby Bland.

Separately McGriff and Crawford helped popularize the soul jazz sound of the 1960’s. Together they’ve spread the sound to pop, rap and contemporary jazz listeners. Live music from the soul mates Jimmy McGriff and Hank Crawford are next on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jimmy McGriff and Hank Crawford.

The summer blockbuster was born twenty-five years ago when “Jaws” terrified moviegoers and kept them out of the water. Right when you think it’s safe to go back in, along comes “The Perfect Storm.”

But if you don’t want to watch men battle the ocean, you can see them battle each other in “Gladiator,” “The Patriot,” “Shanghai Noon,” and “X-Men.” Tom Cruise is the star summer stud in “MI2,” Clint Eastwood is the aging stud in “Space Cowboys,” and Kevin Bacon is the invisible stud in “The Hollow Man.”

If you’re not into violence and special effects, you can go see Bruce Willis get in touch with his inner child in “The Kid.” There’s a gentler, kinder Mel Gibson in “Chicken Run” and Jim Carrey fans can belly laugh through “Me, Myself and Irene.” Anyway you look at it, this year’s summer movies are for the men and the boys; there’s not a romance in sight.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Garyn Daly, director of the Dedham Community Theatre in Dedham, Massachusetts

and Charlie Taylor, Critic-At-Large for Salon.com.

Few people realize the courage it takes for a woman to open a romance novel on a plane. She knows what people are thinking when they see a bare chested Fabio on her jacket cover. They don’t appreciate, as she does, real “heaving chests,” “tender violence” and “sensuous innocence.” But millions of women like her do.

Romance novels account for nearly half the paperbacks sold in this country, racking up a billion dollars a year in sales. They are translated into over 20 languages and published in over 100 international markets. They’re novels written by women for women.

And while some feminists say these books perpetuate male domination and female subservience, fans say romance novels are all about female empowerment. The heroines are feisty, smart and tenacious. They win the hero by taming his machismo and having him get in touch with his emotional side. And the endings are always happy.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michele Jaffe, author of The Water Nymph and The Stargazer.

Uganda, in the middle of the sub-Saharan AIDS plague, may be the closest thing to an African success story against the disease. It’s a success born of a relentless sex education campaign led personally by President Museveni: a campaign of open talk, free condoms, and militant inclusion of the churches, Muslim and Christian, in the public health offensive.

Success is relative, of course, and Uganda’s is a victory that many other poor third-world societies want desperately to avoid. The AIDS infection rate in Uganda today is something over 8 percent — four times the rate in Thailand, ten times the rate in India.

But in the African neighborhood, where 70 percent of all the world’s AIDS is concentrated, Uganda’s good news is that AIDS is down, from 14 percent of the population, while it rages upward past 20 percent in South Africa, past 25 percent in Zimbabwe, past 35 percent in Botswana.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ochoru Otunnu, Executive Director of the African AIDS Initiative in New York

John Nagenda, Chief Advisor to the President of Uganda

Catherine Sozi, Director of Clinical Services at Mildmay International AIDS Clinic in Kampala, Uganda.

Einstein’s brain is on the loose. For 40-odd years the famous gray matter was kept in a tupperware container belonging to the elusive Princeton pathologist Thomas Harvey, who never quite managed to deliver on his promises to research its supposedly unique properties.

Over the decades Harvey and the brain disappeared from view, resurfacing from time to time to send a few slices of a lobe to persistent petitioners. Writer Michael Paterniti eventually tracked him down, and on a whim signed on to drive the octogenarian Harvey and the famous brain across the country in a pilgrimage of sorts, with a thought of returning it to Einstein’s granddaughter.

The American road is the setting for a surreal story. Einstein said: “We should take care not to make the intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.” Paterniti’s is a journey with plenty of both.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Paterniti, author of Driving Mr. Albert

Dr. Elliot Krauss, Chairman of Pathology at Princeton University Medical Center.

The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes, thinking about God, observed, “The Ethiopians say their gods are black; the Thracians say their gods have blue eyes and red hair. If cattle or horses or lions had hands to draw and sculpt, they would make gods in their own likenesses.”

Socrates heard a divine voice that lead him to choose death over falsehood, the Pythagoreans thought that numbers were sacred, and Aristotle’s God was the Prime Mover, the one who got the whole show going.

Ever since the Greeks, philosophy has been struggling with God. St. Augustine of Hippo came to God’s Truth by way of the pagan philosopher Plato. St. Thomas Aquinas laboured to show that there was no conflict between Aristotelian rationality and Christian Truth. The Enlightenment, and most famously Nietzsche declared God dead. But Philosophy keeps finding it necessary to re-invent him.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Hilary Putnam, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University
Alvin Plantinga, Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University.

Remember “Bowling Alone” — the malaise of a culture with no community? Mr. Bowling Alone, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is back now with his retested theory.

Americans aren’t joining, volunteering, and participating in civic culture anymore, he says. They’re not girl scouts, or elks; they’re not in the rotary or the sewing circle or the PTA. They’re not having picnics, they’re not going to church and they’re not voting. They may be bowling, but they’re bowling alone.

Without the glue of networks and connections — what Robert Putnam calls social capital — societies are doomed to be less healthy, less safe and less educated. “Your chance of dying over the next year is cut in half if you join just one group,” says Robert Putnam. “Isolation is as big a factor as smoking.” Or as Yogi Berra is said to have remarked: “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t come to yours.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University

and political scientist Sheila Tobias.

Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign is different this year. It’s not just that he’s raising money and “running” hither and yon where he barely “stood” for election four years ago. The lethal difference is that Nader is only too happy to gouge Al Gore’s claims to conscience: Nader calls the Vice President “an environmental imposter,” a “gee-whiz techno twit.”

And if Ralph Nader finds himself in a position, come November, to strip key states like California, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania from Gore and the Democrats, he will do it with relish. George W. Bush may be worse, a corporate creature “beyond satire,” in Nader’s dig. But Al Gore’s the obstacle, he says, to what the country needs most: a people’s alternative to corporate control over work and wages, over medicine and media, over trade policy and, yes, political campaigns.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ralph Nader

If life is a journey through a wilderness, the writer Bruce Chatwin decided, “the best thing is to walk” — to walk, in the wisdom of Chinese poetry, “in the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way.” The anatomist of melancholy Robert Burton thought walking was the best cure. The great American walker Thoreau, preached: “You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.”

This was the spirit of the poet Wordsworth, who logged 180,000 miles around England’s Lake District and elsewhere and must have been the most prolific walker of all time. When a visitor asked to see Wordsworth’s study, his servant said: “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Rebecca Solnit’s reverential history of walking makes it clear: if we’re too deep into car culture to save shank’s mare and the humane art of reflective walking, we’ve really lost something.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust.