The Munich Summer Games of 1972, the showcase of Olga Korbut’s gymnastics and Mark Spitz’s swimming, were “the Olympics of Serenity,” as Germany billed them, that became “the Olympics of Terror.” For 21 hours under the unblinking cameras of ABC television, hooded gunmen of the Palestinian faction “Black September” held Israeli athletes hostage, killing 11 of them before the botched getaway and airport firefight were over.

It was a horror story on live TV that changed forever the mood of the Olympics and the imagery of terrorism. And now it’s the stuff of an Oscar winning experiment in movie-making: a documentary that’s also a thriller. Perhaps the strangest note in the hindsight on the Munich massacre is that it’s the German politicians and security bunglers who still don’t want to talk about it, and the last surviving Palestinian warrior who does. “One Day in September” and the men who made the movie. Listen in.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arthur Cohn, Co-Producer of Oscar-winning “One Day in September” and winner of 5 previous Oscars

and Kevin Macdonald Director, One Day In September

“On or about December, 1910, human character changed,” Virgina Wolf said in London. But in New York’s Greenwich Village as well, a band of artists and intellectuals committed to free speech, free love, and progressive politics was giving birth to an American modernism that snuffed out the stodgy Victorian bourgeois century.

America’s first real counterculture of novelists, journalists, immigrant Jews, trade unionists, and political revolutionaries did with salon talk what Picasso was doing with collage in Paris: it tried to live and express what was real. The Bohemians wanted to bring democracy into their personal lives and put direct emotional into politics.

Many became famous later – like Georgia O’Keefe, Eugene O’Neil, and Margaret Sanger. They made New York into the ultimate American city and created an American brand of feminism that’s still working itself out today.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Christine Stansell, Author of “American Moderns”

What do Woody Allen, Bill Gates, George Clooney, and Samuel Clemens have in common? They’re all non-believers of one kind or another. In an age when the vast majority of Americans are embracing various faiths, the secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, rationalists, skeptics, and other non-theists among us may be getting short shrift.

Warren A. Smith has spent the last 50 years compiling an encyclopedic tome that chronicles historical currents of non-theistic thought, and catalogs about 10,000 of its better-known adherents. From the Marquis de Sade, who described himself as “atheistic to the point of fanaticism”, to Carl Sagan, who called religions “the nurseries of pseudo-science”, to Marlene Dietrich, who said “if there is a Supreme Being, he’s crazy,” Warren A. Smith has unearthed a bevy of non-believers.

The book is called “Who’s Who In Hell”, and we’re checking to see if we’re in it.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Warren A. Smith, Author of “Who’s Who In Hell”

Science fiction for a century has been scaring us with robots. Now they’re coming out of movies and into your living room. Today’s robots are more like The Jetson’s docile helper Rosie than Arnold Schwartzenager’s Terminator. Real science has produced robots that crawl, swim, and dance. Some play tennis.

It was Rodney Brooks and his artificial intelligence lab at MIT that inspired the movie title “Fast Cheap and Out of Control.” Brooks’ latest breed of chrome creatures are “humanoids” that play with slinkies, use tools, and respond to facial expressions. One, named Kismet, coos like a baby and perks up its ears when it sees its favorite toy.Soon, robots could be sitting in on your meetings, vacuuming your carpets, even carrying on a conversation. But can they respond to emotions as well as commands? Can you imagine a robot with a personality? The robots are coming, listen in.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

MIT Professor, Rodney Brooks

You’ve heard about Dick Cheney’s golden handshake with his oil-drilling Halliburton Company when he left to run for vice president. But have you heard how Halliburton, on Cheney’s watch, doubled its government contracting to $2.3-billion, while Cheney himself was building his personal fortune toward $50-million. File it under: the oil agenda, or money interests in politics, and how we tend to ignore them.

There’s been more talk about Cheney’s lesbian daughter and his loathing of big government than about his corporate entanglement in US loans and contracts. As with Bill Clinton: it’s easier to talk about sex in the Oval Office than about the Democrats’ debts to Wall Street, Hollywood and trial lawyers. What if Campaign 2000, like politics in general, really is “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Who’s buying whom this season, and why? We’re following the campaign money, this hour on the connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

UMass Professor Tom Ferguson, UT Austin Professor Walter Dean Burnham, Larry Makinson, Executive Director of The Center for Responsive Politics

Neal Pollack will most likely be remembered as the most famous writer of the 20th century. In 1950, Ernest Hemingway called Neal Pollack the “greatest young writer alive;” and he was only twenty years old at the time. He went on to write a biography of Stalin, become one of the Hollywood blacklisted, and cover the Vietnam War.

Along the way, he won three National Books Awards, the Booker Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award for his acclaimed “Memories of Myself” and last year, at the age of 69, was named “Hot Indie Novelist to Watch” by Salon Magazine. He’s hobnobbed with the century’s most important political figures — Fidel Castro, Jack Kennedy, Nelson Mandela — and married its most fascinating women – Mary McCarthy, Claire Bloom and Janeane Garafalo.

Recently, he has compiled the definitive book of American journalism in the second half of this century – an anthology of his own work.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Author Neal Pollack, Author/Editor/Publisher David Eggers, and John Hodgman.

Should E-Commerce be taxed? Will Wireless live up to its hype? Is the Open Source movement a Communist diversion?
Bob Metcalfe has taken technology punditry to new lengths in his weekly columns on these and other questions of the Internet era. As inventor of the Ethernet, the networking technology that connects 100 million computers worldwide, and founder of the company 3com, Bob Metcalfe is one of those Information Age pioneers who even has a ‘law’ named after him. “Metcalfe’s Law” posits that “the value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users.” If a pundit’s value grows in relation to the accuracy of his predictions, then Metcalfe lost some big points in 1996 when he predicted the Internet would crash in spectacular fashion. When it didn’t, Metcalfe ate his column in front of a live audience.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bob Metcalfe.