The future is wireless. What’s not so clear is who’s going to be doing the work that allows you to place a phone call from almost anywhere in the world.

Eighty-seven thousand Old Fashioned Telephone union workers are on strike since Sunday at Verizon — the nation’s largest telecommunications company. What they want is to get in on the fast growing, billion-dollar wireless industry by organizing their mostly non-union wireless counterparts. At Verizon’s wireless division a mere “46” of thirty-two thousand workers are union members.

Verizon’s take is that the industry is so competitive, increased union representation would put them at a disadvantage. Shareholders could think so too. While old line labor numbers are rapidly dwindling across the country, the strike has broad implications for what’s now a mostly non-unionized high tech industry. Organized labor meets the new economy.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

George Brandon, editor of Telecommunication Reports Daily, an electronic news service of Telecommunications Reports

Paul Osterman, Professor of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Business

Eric Rabe, Vice President of Media Relations for Verizon

Steve Early, National Union Representative for the Communications Workers Union.

If you were born in Mexico, grew up in the U.S., work in Paris and marry a Swede, who are your children, exactly?
The global economy is a community of hybrids. Mixed marriages and cultural juxtapositions of all kinds are becoming the norm. On a planet with 5,000 or so ethnic groups and 600 living languages, the possibilities for mixing are literally endless, as are the ancient barriers.

Children of these radical combinations grow up multilingual and multicultural. And they come of age in an interconnected world, in which the old notions of identity are dissolving. If you’re among the mongrels, Gregg Zachary says: count yourself lucky. He says the new global economy actually favors people and nations that can work with hybridity.

So what if the New Cosmopolitans face some confusion and alienation? Zachary says: they have roots as well as wings.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gregg Zachary

Forty years ago, four years ago, even four days ago, a Jew on a presidential ticket might have sounded like the start of a nervous joke, a political impossibility. Yet Joseph Lieberman as Al Gore’s running mate is being cast already less as Orthodox Jew, more as all-around mensch… a morally serious, moderately conservative Democrat whose religion just happens to be Judaism.

The media story about this Jewish “first” is that there may be no story at all; that yesterday’s taboo is today’s mere footnote. But do you really believe it?

Americans, 15 to 1, told the Gallup poll last year they could vote for a qualified Jew for president; but do we lie even to ourselves about bigotry? The Presidents of Waspy old Harvard, Yale and Princeton are today all Jews; but does the end of institutional anti-Semitism mean it’s over in hearts and minds, in the rust-belt and in voting booths?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alan Dershowitz, Professor at Harvard Law School

Jacob Weisberg, Chief Political Correspondent for Slate.com

Anthony Campbell, Professor of Theology at Boston University

Judith Shulevitz, Chief Culture Writer for Slate.com.

If you can read a magazine without examining the Absolut ad, or watch TV and ignore the new Gap spot, you may be immune to marketing.

Consumers seem to have built up antibodies against advertising’s traditional techniques. In the New Economy the trick is to make us market to one another. Hotmail, the Macarena, the Blair Witch Project – all examples of good old word-of-mouth, multiplied by billions of momentary connections in the Information Age.

The business writer Seth Godin calls them “Ideaviruses,” mini-trends that can become tidal waves at some unpredictable “tipping point.” Business strategy in the internet environment must be to nurture and launch Ideaviruses – and the products and services behind them. Would you know an Ideavirus if one bit you?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Seth Godin, author of Unleashing the Ideavirus.

Socrates’s line, that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” was addressed not to the philosophers’ trade union but to the citizens of Athens, and in that sense to all of us. “The philosophical raw material,” as the contemporary Thomas Nagel puts it, “comes directly from the world and our relation to it, not from writings of the past.”

Which is why the big questions keep popping up on their own: the “what’s it all about, Alfie” questions, the relation of mind to body and of spirit to mind, the nature of truth, the imperative of justice, the scope of freedom, the mystery of language, the meaning of it all.

Cornel West of Harvard teaches and lives the examined life: from boyhood he saw philosophy as a calling to observe wealth and social misery all around us, to study the interplay of hope, doubt, faith, suffering and joy in his own life, to make sense of the world. In wrap-up week 9 of our summer series, the philosophical life is our final subject.
(hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Cornel West, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion at Harvard University

author of The Cornel West Reader

How was it that Europeans discovered the New World and not Africans or Chinese? Sometimes the simplest, most obvious question provokes the best answer.

When the UCLA biologist Jared Diamond visited the tropical island of New Guinea several years ago, a native man named Yali asked him why it was that whites ruled the world. Jared Diamond didn’t have an answer right off but over 20 years later he came up with a book-length explanation that covers the last 13,000 years of human history.

It’s not about biology or racial superiority. Europeans and Asians came to control most of the world rather than Africans, Native Americans or New Guineans because of geography, climate, good grains, plants, animals, lots of settled-down people, and a good amount of luck. In the end, Jared Diamond says, the fate of human society comes down to “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Vice President Al Gore is going to choose Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate today.

Lieberman is an orthodox Jew, the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket. He’s a Clintonesque new Democrat of the abortion rights, gun control, tax cutting variety and he was the first democrat who stepped out in the Monica Lewinsky scandal to say that President Bill Clinton’s behavior with the White House intern was immoral and harmful. The Gore campaign is calling the choice a bold stroke for a New Guard ticket against the Old Guard politics of the Repbulicans.

Joe Lieberman comes out of the ethnic Democratic tradition in Connecticut. One of his boyhood heroes Abe Ribicoff knocked George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush out of the US Senate in 1962. Will the Lieberman choice work for centrist Democrats and suburban soccer moms to steel Al Gore for the fight for the middle in Campaign 2000?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bill Curry, former advisor to the Clinton White House

E.J. Dionne, Jr., columnist for the Washington Post

Michael Kelly, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly

Michael Barone, writer for U.S. News & World Report.

Thanks to blockbuster movies and books, it is by now the most familiar legend in the history of art, and still it’s beyond understanding: that Vincent Van Gogh, a Dutch minister’s son and a tender-hearted do-gooder and drifter into his late twenties, should then have taught himself to draw and paint and in the brief burst of ten years’ work should have turned his original vision into a mountain of masterpieces until his mind came apart and he killed himself at the age of 37.

He painted sunflowers and irises and landscapes and skyscapes — but it’s the portraits now touring that seem at the heart of Van Gogh’s project, as he said, “to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow,” so that people might say of his work, “he feels deeply, he feels tenderly,” in spite of his roughness. A century later, they’re everything he aspired to: apparitions of character intensified by his color genius and his passion.
(hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

George T. M. Shackelford, Chair of the Department of the Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Sjraar Van Heugten, Head of the Collections, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

George W. Bush made it largely a personal story last night: of a mischievous kid who’d given his mother white hair growing up in Texas wildcatter country, the story of a late-blooming provincial who’d suffered by his own mistakes, been redeemed by grace and learned in his heart about Americans who struggle.

So when he said: “My fellow citizens, we can begin again,” he was seeing himself in the country and the country in his story… which any biographer of Bush money and dynastic politics would have told somewhat differently.

The political content in George W.’s acceptance speech was another page rewritten: the conservative who killed the McCain reform challenge in the spring went heavy on compassion last night, with a “no way” reassurance to seniors against compromising social security and with a pledge to “tear down the wall” of social isolation by race and class. Have we got it straight yet?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Kevin Phillips, political commentator and author of The Cousins War

Lou Dubose, co-author (with Molly Ivins) of Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush

Elizabeth Mitchell author of W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty.

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Does the wearing of magnets improve circulation?

In an age of technological wonders, who can confidently distinguish amazing facts from folklore and fable? Fifty-year old women are having babies, sheep are being cloned, and water has been discovered on Mars. Last month physicists in Princeton used two lasers to exceed the speed of light….or perhaps not.

Is it any surprise that homeopathy, Cold Fusion, and touch therapy hold such sway over a credulous public? “Extraordinary claims,” said Carl Sagan, “are expected to be backed up by extraordinary evidence.” All too often the evidence is lacking, or buried by scheming entrepreneurs, and careless media and by scientists blinded by ambition.

Somewhere in the mix are true scientific advances and proven alternative medicine. The rest, says physicist Robert Park, is Voodoo science.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert L. Park, author of Voodoo Science.