Charles Mingus sits alongside Monk and Miles as a giant among jazz performers and composers. He was also a man of giant appetites and perilous passions that sometimes threatened to consume his career. For 40 years Mingus showcased his virtuosic bass-playing and innovative bandleading while cultivating a reputation as Jazz’s “angry man.” He was angry about racism, he was angry about music, and he lashed out in fury at friend and foe alike.

Mingus once knocked out the front tooth of his trombonist and arranger Jimmy Knepper, and he regularly abused his audiences, promoters, and multiple wives with chaotic rage. As a composer Mingus focused his restless musical mind on fighting the bebop era’s obsessive individualism with his own technique of “controlled improvisation” – an approach that yielded some of jazz’s greatest compositions. We’re remembering Mingus, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gene Santoro, author of “Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus”

In his classic The Souls of Black Folk published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois declared: “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was the philosopher and propagandist of black power and civil rights in this country long before they arrived. Nearly 40 years after the end of his very long life, Du Bois is a world legend for the breadth of his anti-colonial vision, for his prickly, principled independence and for the lyricism and crackling clarity of his prose.

“Before the Pilgrim landed, we were here,” he wrote early on. “Out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst.” At odds with the designated black leader Booker T. Washington, Du Bois held out for voting rights, full legal rights and the heights of education. At his death in exile in Ghana in 1963, the composer, conductor and Bass virtuoso was at odds with his country, as great prophets often are. W. E. B. DuBois, the finished biography, is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Levering Lewis, author of “W.E.B. Dubois: the fight for equality and the American century, 1919 – 1963″

Are you a market populist? Author Thomas Frank says the 90’s were the final stage of a creeping consensus that capitalism and free trade are the ultimate expression of democracy and the people’s will. In other words, what’s good for the market is good for America. The mores and methods of the marketplace have escaped the business section into society at large, and, according to Frank, we’re all the poorer for it.

From 24-hour stock tickers on cable TV to the Pollyanna press in magazines like Fast Company and Wired, credible dissent has virtually disappeared and we’re left with paeans to prosperity. You could blame Clinton’s abandonment of traditional Democratic social policy, or the ascendancy of the boomers’ Bohemian Bourgeoisie. But lost in rhetoric of the New Economy’s nattering nabobs are the stubborn facts of economic disparity and social crises galore. We’re puncturing market populism this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Thomas Frank, author of “One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy”

Caroline Minter Hoxby is a technical economist who speaks in accessible fables. Public schools would work better, she says, if we thought of them more like restaurants. A restaurant full of discontented diners would not be reinforced with public money; it would be allowed to go out of business. Competition from new restaurants makes all restaurants better. Some of Hoxby’s conclusions sound too simple.

Some of findings go hard against the grain of common school wisdom: There’s no evidence in experience, she says, that class size has any effect on student achievement. Public students perform worse, she says, where teachers’ unions are strong. What affects everything positively, she reports, is the ease with which parents and children can choose other public or private schools. But vouchers won’t work until all kids have a shot at them. Caroline Minter Hoxby and her case for schools competition are this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Caroline Hoxby, professor of economics at Harvard University

One in nine is the startling statistic of the number of women who develop breast cancer. It’s also the name of the hot pink rowing shell you’ll see this weekend on the Charles River in Boston’s famous, annual “Head of the Charles” rowing regatta. The eight rowers and coxswain are all breast cancer survivors. They’re from all over the country, around 50 years old, and they’ll all tell you that rowing saved their lives.

When their doctors told them never expect to lift more than 10 pounds again and that their arm muscles would always be weak, these women went back to their boats, learned to ask for help from their teammates, and got stronger. Nine of them have joined together to compete against 21 other boats in the Master’s Women’s 8 Division this weekend. They’re out to demonstrate solidarity and a shared sort of recovery. They also want to win. Rowing and breast cancer, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Holly Metcalfe, One in 9 coach

and scullers Diane Cotting and Michelle Marks

We learned in the second presidential debate that Texas is a state where the legislature meets 140 days every two years. A lot of Texans think two days every 140 years would be enough. Texas is a state of mind that’s generally down on “gov’mint,” even when you’re running it, in George W. Bush’s case. And of course it’s down on the anagram of Texas, spelled Taxes. Al Gore wants the country to know some of the results: that Texas is at the bottom of the state rankings for kids and families with health insurance, for example.

You can learn a lot more about Texas on the Internet: that it’s number one in executions of course, number one in drunk-driving deaths, and energy consumption; number one in the number of gun dealers and gun shows, number one in industrial production of hazardous wastes. You can learn still more from Molly Ivins and Paul Burka, who fight over Texas for a living. The great state of Texas is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Columnist and writer Molly Ivins

Texas Monthly executive editor Paul Burka

Ray Sullivan from the George W. Bush campaign.

The “Remains of the Day” novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is half a world away in his new one. Shanghai between the world wars is his new territory, but the emotional terrain feels familiar: it’s the realm of a meticulous but suspiciously cracked memory, yet another Ishiguro exercise in just how unreliable a narrator can be-to the point of delusion and pathos. In “Remains of the Day” the perfectly oblivious butler, the Anthony Hopkins part in the movie, was unaware that the lord of his manor was a Nazi.

The hero of “When We Were Orphans” is an English detective in China, driven by a childish dream that the savagery of the modern world can be figured out, clue by clue, Sherlock Holmes style, and solved like an old-fashioned whodunnit. Nostalgia stumbles on modern evil in Ishiguro’s fiction. East meets West; narrative realism frames a murky dreamscape. The literary link between Dickens and the global culture, Kazuo Ishiguro, is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker-prize-winning author of “Remains of the Day”

Boomers and Xers, make way for the Millenials. As Generation X finishes college and some head into their 30s, what do we make of the bumper crop of kids that filled this year’s high school yearbooks? If you were born in 1982 or after, you’re part of what historian Neil Howe calls the Millennial Generation. Counter to knee-jerk stereotypes of “young people today”, Millennials are optimistic, community-minded, modest and morally conservative. Unlike the latchkey kids of Gen X, Millennials can’t remember a time when parents and politicians weren’t focused on them and their needs.

This is the generation that grew up with “baby on board” signs and George W. Bush urging us to hug our children. But it is also a stressed-out and overscheduled generation, and one with record levels of obesity, asthma, and attention-deficit disorder. Neil Howe says the Millenials’ mores mirror those of the G.I. generation. Kids today this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Neil Howe, historian, economist, demographer, and co- author of “Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation.”

Storyteller and essayist Cynthia Ozick writes about the ladle in her kitchen drawer as the image of her reading imagination. Not talking about a timid little spoon now, good enough for teacups and sweet puddings. “A ladle,” as she says, “is a great guzzling inebriate, given to gargantuan draughts; a swiller of oceanic wassail; a diver into densest abysses.” In the infinite well of her sensibility, that ladle is her Big Dipper that keeps on dipping.

It began for Cynthia Ozick in the Depression and the Bronx when it felt like the countryside of New York, when great writers meant Jane Austen, George Eliot, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and The Master, Henry James. The second-stage rocket of her reading life is fired by the literature of the Holocaust–in which the popular favorite, The Diary of Anne Frank–stands out, she writes, for its sentimentality and obtuseness around unredeemable truth. The readers’ reader Cynthia Ozick is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Novelist, Essayist, and Reader Cynthia Ozick whose latest book is “Quarrel and Quandary”

This is the way a campaign ends: with the post-game spin about the body language of the last debate, with a barrage of television commercials, with a last sprint by the candidates into the swing states with an alternative focus on the Subway Series for the baseball title in New York. Bill Bradley reminds you how the campaign started: with spirited challengers to both party establishments, with a lot of reform talk, with the campaign bus and retail politicking in New Hampshire and Iowa living rooms.

After the end of his one time presidential campaign, Bill Bradley said it ended so abruptly it felt more like losing the NBA playoffs on a final shot. He’s touring the country all alone now with a new book he calls “The Journey From Here.” It’s part memoir, part play book, part post-game analysis, part an invitation to what might have been. Bill Bradley’s scorecard on Campaign 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Former Presidential Candidate and Democratic Senator Bill Bradley and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson.