Of all the brilliant people the British theatre has produced in the last 50 years, none was more brilliant or unique than Kenneth Tynan.

Tynan was not a playwright. He was not an actor, director or producer. He was a critic who became as important to the theatre as the people he reviewed. And the stars of his time realized that, and welcomed him as a colleague.

Tynan was also a compulsive journal keeper and gossip: And what gossip. Kenneth Tynan knew all the stars — drank with them, wrote about them. Laurence Oliver: knew him. Marlene Dietrich: knew her. Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, knew them all and wrote about them all. His journals are an essential document of the artistic life of his times.

Critic, Chronicler and very funny fellow — the life and legacy of Kenneth Tynan is on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Lahr, theater critic for The New Yorker.

What weighs three pounds and has ten billion electrical connections? Hint: it is not the CIA’s most powerful laptop computer. Another hint: it contains 100 billion nerves.

It is the human brain — an object that looks remarkably the same in all of us yet houses our sense of our own uniqueness — our consciousness. Defining consciousness has been the frustrating quest of philosophers for centuries — philosophy students console themselves with the joke that consciousness is what we lose when we go to sleep and get back in the morning when we wake up.

Leaving the mind-body problem behind, the serious search for consciousness has now shifted to the neurosciences. Their definition of consciousness is not an abstract — it is a physical property which can be located in that three pound mass inside our skulls. Scientists are plotting the connections in the brain, looking for the elusive place where the self resides.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Susan Greenfield, neurobiologist and author of The Private Life of the Brain.

They don’t make them like the Gentleman from New York, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, anymore. A more complex figure in the Senate it is hard to imagine. A far-sighted intellectual in a profession that places a premium on cunning in the here and now. A man of arrogant demeanor in a world where getting along to go along is the house motto.

Yet when Moynihan announced he was retiring from the Senate this year the praise singers were out in full: Most intellectually gifted man in American politics since Abraham Lincoln, said some — no, since Thomas Jefferson, said others. The New York Post in its elevated way noted Moynihan was a superb Senator because “nobody did more to bring home the bacon for New York.”

The praise singing must have had an ironic sound in Moynihan’s ears. He has been vilified since the 1960’s for his views on race. Remember the phrase “Benign Neglect?” It hangs around his reputation like the Albatross hung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Godfrey Hodgson, author of The Gentleman from New York

Read any good books lately? If you haven’t it may be because the art of book editing is fading.

Book editing is the most silent, the least honoured and arguably the most unique of all creative crafts. Painters don’t call in editors to help them touch up their canvases, composers don’t have to take their manuscripts to someone else before their music is performed in public. But the editor is indispensible to the process of writing. At mid-century legendary editors like Malcolm Cowley and Maxwell Perkins were credited with bringing the genius of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway to fruition.

But today publishing houses, once the domain of wealthy gentlemen who loved literature and didn’t mind making a few dollars from it, are now profit centers in multi-national media conglomerates. Editors who once spent most of their time looking for ways to help authors shape their books now spend their days playing corporate party games, power lunching, making friends with the vice-president of marketing and protecting their backs. The dying art of book editing is next.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Peter Davison, poet and retired editor of Houghton Mifflin

Betsy Lerner, past senior editor of Doubleday

Sylvia Burack, editor and publisher of The Writer.

“No matter what you may think of me” — with that unscripted aside, still president Bill Clinton handed off his party and his legacy to his “partner” Vice-President Al Gore. The Clinton Speech was everything that the nation has come to expect from the President. Bullish, optimistic and delivered with the practiced fervor a of popular Baptist preacher.

Typical too was its audacity in thinking that the audience outside the Staples Center would somehow look past the dark side of his behavior in office. It wasn’t so much passing the torch as beating the drum for his administration’s economic accomplishments. It was for a caring/sharing politician the ultimate caring/sharing moment — as he credited Gore with being an equal partner in the decision-making that led to the longest economic expansion in American history.

But it was for the most naturally-gifted politician of his time not an occasion for saying good-bye — saying thanks, yes — but not good-bye. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow — and don’t go singing yesterday quite yet.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Mario Cuomo, Former Governor of New York

Robert Dallek, Presidential Historian, Professor of History at Boston University

Bill Curry, Former Advisor to the Clinton White House, Delegate at the Democratic Convention

Bob Zelnick, Professor of Journalism at Boston University, author of Gore: A Political Life.

On this hour, “A History Of Celibacy.” According to author Elizabeth Abbott, lifelong abstention is not just for the religious. Throughout history there have been castrated boys destined for an operatic career, young women cloistered against thier will, or frustrated bacheolors doomed by the surplus of males in contemporary China. What caused and still causes people to give up sex?
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Elizabeth Abbott, author of ” A History of Celibacy.”

Psychotherapy, for decades a face to face process, is now becoming an interface to interface process.

Psychotherapists are no more immune to net-fever than the rest of us. Online therapists offer a full range of services — feeling tired for no good reason and wondering if you’re depressed? You can fill in a questionnaire on the web and get a diagnosis. Needing to talk through a problem but a few dollars shy of the 150 bucks a pop the doc is charging to help you over the hump? You can get a consult on-line for as little as twenty dollars.

But how effective is this approach? And how secure are the online confessions patients make in their conversation with their cybershrinks? One noted psychiatrist calls e-therapy disastrous. Another calls it very important. Freud.Com is next.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dr. Arthur Sullivan, Co-founder and Vice President of Mentalhealthline.com

Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor at MIT and clinical psychologist specializing in people and computers.

Confession is good for the soul. You could even say it’s become our national pastime.

Memoirs crowd the best seller list, all manner of revelation is told to Jenny Jones on national TV, or to Dr. Laura Schlesinger on national radio. We confess to our priests, our psychiatrists, our chat rooms, our lovers, our spouses. We watched President Clinton confess to what, by the end, everyone already knew.

Oscar Wilde claimed man’s brightest moment is “when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.” Yet at the same time we want confessions, we’re also suspicious of them. We know people confess falsely when they’re coerced or frightened, so laws exist to protect us — Miranda, our right to a lawyer, the Fifth Amendment. But the great confessional novels, The Brothers Karamazov, Lolita, or Albert Camus’s The Fall, seem to say we want to tell all – both the sins we committed and the sins we didn’t.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Peter Brooks, author of Troubling Confessions.

Want to rent a three-star General? How about a CIA veteran?

In the post-Cold War world, privatization has extended deep into the military. Cold Warriors are now available for hire, and without nosey congressional oversight committees to bother with. The Pentagon’s budget is still a hefty $268 billion dollars, yet professional national security players keep turning up in the private sector.

With their counterparts in other countries, especially Russia, they populate an expanding universe of defense contractors, lobbyists, intelligence consultants, arms dealers, and mercenaries. The writer Ken Silverstein says these Private Warriors are shaping U.S. foreign policy, and in some cases even carrying it out. In this election season, Silverstein says, they are also the main reason that the long-shot “Star Wars” missile defense program is still afloat.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ken Silverstein, author of Private Warriors.

James Carter, on any one of his many saxophones, is the embodiment of more history than he’s lived in a brilliant young career in music.

Slim, strikingly tailored and handsome, he is at 30 the proudest of the young peacocks in jazz. He may be the most talked about new saxophonist since Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane in the sixties — for an individual sound that can be graceful or groovy and emotionally loaded.

He is also a collector of saxophones and master of many of them… and he is an authoritative historian of the practitioners on each one: the bass saxophone that the Belgian inventor Adolph Sax loved most; the baritone sax of Gerry Mulligan and Duke Ellington’s Harry Carney; the tenor sax of Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry, the alto of Charlie Parker and Eric Dolphy, the soprano saxophone of Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

James Carter, saxophonist.