The Eco-efficient formula: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is just a bandaid, says the utopian William McDonough. The treatment, maybe the cure, he says is to rethink every aspect of design-from the lifecycle of TVs to the green spaces in communities-with the thought of eliminating waste and pollution forever. Could you build an auto factory, he asks his big clients like the Ford Motor Company, so that a bird flying overhead wouldn’t notice any change from the natural environment?

McDonough uses wood from sustainable forests, and his designs take inspiration from the local landscapes. He works on factories that produce wasewater you could drink, buildings that are net producers of energy, and fabrics so free of chemicals you can use them as compost, even eat them. William McDonough’s Next Industrial Revolution is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William McDonough, Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, founding designer of William McDonough & Partners, and recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development

and David Orr, Chair of the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin College and author of “Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect”.

Managed care is suddenly in intensive care, in danger of dying, in the state that was supposed to have tamed the healthcare monster–the state that spends more on medicine, gets better results, trains more doctors, says “we’re number one” in healthcare, and we’re still militantly unhappy. By a 2-to-1 margin, a patients’ and doctors’ rebellion is threatening to pass a ballot initiative in Massachusetts that would un-manage care by restoring free choice of specialists, putting a 10 percent cap on the non-medical overhead of HMOs.

It would ban for-profit managed-care companies. And it would demand universal health coverage by the year 2002. To Al Gore, George W. Bush, and all the established powers in Massachusetts: a vote for Question 5 says: prescription coverage under Medicare is tokenism; a patient bill-of-rights is a placebo; incremental improvement won’t do. Who’s willing to take a chance on a healthcare revolution, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Himmelstein, M.D., General Practitioner at Cambridge Hospital, one of the leaders for Physicians for National Health

Gore-ism is the Democrats’ sequel to Clintonism, which is not to say it’s the same. Gore-ism is delivered dutifully and correctly; it’s the good son’s politics without the rascality and, some say, the charm of the prodigal Comeback Kid. Among the big differences: Al Gore volunteered for Army duty in Vietnam, and confirms that he did inhale. But there are as many common threads with Clinton.

Al Gore started out in Tennessee in the seventies a “raging moderate,” he said; and he’s thrived as one of those triangulating Democrats, like Bill Clinton, who wanted to split some differences with Republicans–on Ronald Reagan’s Contra war in Nicaragua, early on, and even on his own environmental agenda. He’s a campaign finance reformer who’s taken a lot of soft money. He’s a fighter for the people, he says, who was born to money and power and has been teased as “Prince Albert.” We’re finding the core of Gore this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alex Cockburn, author of “Al Gore: A User’s Manual;” David Maraniss, Washington Post reporter and author of “The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore;”

Ted Koppel is the late night American TV fixture that’s not a joke. He beats David Letterman in the ratings game with old fashioned serious news. “Nightline” grew out of “America Held Hostage,” the TV news miniseries about the embassy hostages in Tehran in 1979. For 20 years now, “Nightline” has been the real “60 Minutes,” which is to say the very best in television journalism now. It pioneered satellite technology which brought antagonists together from all over the world and left Ted Koppel with the edge in all of those interviews.

Many of the encounters are famous now: with Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, with Nelson Mandela, Gary Hart, and Kermit the Frog. And so are the town meetings with Ted Koppel as mediator among South Africans and between Israelis and Arabs and Americans too divided on race, and AIDS, and abortion. America’s last working Ed Murrow is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ted Koppel, Journalist and Anchor of “Nightline”.

In the Church of Jazz, Miles Davis’ album “Kind of Blue” is a holy icon. From a humble birth in 1959 as forty-five minutes of improvised music recorded in two sessions, “Kind Of Blue” has become the best-selling classical jazz record of all-time. Rock stars cite it as a clear influence. Aspiring musicians say it got them hooked on jazz. Aficionados insist it explains jazz. In 1959 Miles Davis was already the innovator who introduced Hard Bop and Cool to jazz.

He wanted his sextet for Kind of Blue to be a laboratory for a new experimental style he called “modal jazz” which would free the soloist forever from the old rules and structures of music. Add to that a Dream Team of talent separated by two degrees from every great jazz record ever and Kind of Blue became an album that almost transcended music. The Casablanca of jazz, Kind of Blue is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ashley Kahn, author of “Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece”

Art Spiegelman is called the Kafka of comics. He’s the man who set out to make us take the funny papers seriously, at least to credit cartoonists with high intentions and deep content. His novel in pictures, “Maus”, was a breakthrough: it was the story of his father’s survival at Dachau–the first Holocaust account presented in comic-strip form. It made the New York Times best-seller list for fiction–until he got it reclassified as history; it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and gave him all the respectability he could handle.

Art Spiegelman made new waves with provocative covers for Tina Brown’s New Yorker: the famous Valentine’s Day image of an African-American woman kissing a Hasidic Jew, or the Tax Day crucifixion of the Easter Bunny. He’s taught intellectuals to read comics without embarrassment, but he’s aiming alternative fairy-tale comics at kids again, too. Art Spiegelman, the grown-up cartoonist is with us, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Art Spiegelman, Illustrator, artist, novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner

You might say that anyone who runs for President is by definition clinically insane. Candidates, after all, are pathologically certain that they are destined to lead the free world, a sure sign of delusional narcissism. As Bush and Gore trade barbs in the waning days of the campaign, voters are judging their personalities as much as their policies. And the armchair psychobiographers among us want more than Oprah and Letterman can diagnose.

Does Bush’s smirk reveal a sense of entitlement? Or is it an unconscious reflex to cover up an Oedipal sense of inferiority? And what are the latent behavioral traits behind Gore’s self-serving exaggerations and rigid arrogance? Both men are privileged sons of powerful politician fathers who were voted out of office; and their mothers are steely, ambitious women who raised their sons to be leaders. So what would Freud say? We’re putting the candidates on the couch this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gail Sheehy, journalist and author

Samuel Shem, psychiatrist and novelist

Paula Caplan, psychologist and author.

Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns after Robert Kennedy was killed, the what-ifs are still irresistible. If he’d won the 1968 campaign, we’d remember a Vice President Nixon sketchily from the 1950s and Watergate not at all. What if he’d really wanted to know, and tell the rest of us: “Who killed JFK?” What if he had lived to resolve the transition where his new biographer Evan Thomas puts him: “an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man.”

At the close of a Bush-Gore race with no heroic pretensions about it, a new biography of Robert Kennedy revives the Rohrshach romance of a black-and-white figure into whom we could project almost anything: a man who “hates like me,” his father said, and who embraced the weak, who lionized warriors and turned against the Vietnam war, the chancellor to an empire who thought of himself as a child, a man who died mid-passage to maturity at 43. RFK reexamined is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Evan Thomas, author of “Bobby Kennedy: A Life”

Butterflies were Vladimir Nabokov’s transcending passion in life — just standing among them, he said, was ecstasy and timelessness. He caught the bug as a child, and it infected him until the day he died. Nabokov metamorphosized from amateur collector into real scientist in his six years as the de facto butterfly curator at Harvard. He spent blissful 14-hour days there staring into his microscope, counting rows of wing scales, examining the structure of genitalia.

His research on American Blues — revamping their classification and re-thinking their evolution — has withstood the scientific test of time. Nabokov’s love of intricacy and his delight in discovery of the “beyond” joined his science to his art; he infused his fiction with lepidoptery, from butterfly expeditions to comic phallic caterpillars to elliptical references – like Lolita’s nickname “dolly”, which means chrysalis in Greek. Nabokov’s butterflies are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Kurt Johnson, co-author with Steve Coates, of “Nabokov’s Blues” and one of the lepidopterists who has taken up Nabokov’s work

and Brian Boyd, author of a two-volume biography of Nabokov and editor of “Nabokov’s Butterflies.”

Most of the labored questions about religion and American politics–around George W. Bush’s invocation of Jesus Christ, or Joe Lieberman’s observation of the Sabbath–strike the author and law professor Stephen Carter as no-brainers. The separation of church and state, he points out, has never kept religious conscience or language out of our politics. The question that interests him, as a religious man and an activist, is rather the right distance from politics that keeps religion radical and pure, like the Hebrew prophets, like Fannie Lou Hamer and other religious heroes of the American civil rights movement.

The mission is to keep religious voices faithful to a vision of truth, far from the inside arguments over slices of the legislative pie. The risk of closeness, he says, is corruption of religion, not politics-and he sees the corruption right and left in religious America today. Stephen Carter’s warning about “God’s Name in Vain” is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Stephen Carter, author of “God’s Name in Vain: the wrongs and rights of religion in politics”.