Out in the rugged West there are colonies of people called Hutterites who embody the pioneer spirit but live entirely removed from the modern world. The Hutterites are Anabaptist farmers and ranchers – close cousins of the Amish – who, after centuries of persecution in Europe, found religious freedom in North America in the 1870s. Their central belief in a kind of Christian communism informs everything they do. They work, worship, and eat together, and have no personal possessions. They do use computers and high-tech machinery; but they speak an old Austrian German dialect, sew their own clothes, and shun television, radio, or anything else that might let in the temptations of worldly materialism.

Hutterites live rigidly structured lives that leave little room for individual expression, but they give this up willingly in exchange for the strong community support that promises spiritual salvation. The Hutterites of North America are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Laura Wilson, photographer

Gertrude Huntington, anthropologist and co-author of “The Hutterites in North America” and co-author of “Amish Children”

Samul Hoffer, ex-Hutterite and author of “The Hutterites: Lives and Images of a Communal People”

Tony Waldner, Hutterite in North Dakota, German school teacher and Bookbinder.

How do you check a book out of a digital library? And how do libraries as we’ve known them meet the challenge of Web search engines that put instant reference desks into every PC, and deliver a bounty of magazines and newspapers and books online? From the Library of Congress on down, America’s libraries are scrambling to keep up with their wired cousins, and without the help of venture capital. The digital age changes all the rules of what’s available, and for a library: what’s worth collecting, what has to be saved for the shelves, or for circulation? Who’s keeping the archives, incidentally, of web magazines like, say, Salon.com, that were born digital and never seen in the old paper form?

What happens when digital copyrights meet the “fair use” principle that lets libraries acquire and share copyrighted works? Why would you ever buy a book online if you can copy one from the library? Digital libraries are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Anne Wolpert, Directory of MIT Libraries

Brewster Kahle, president and founder of the Internet Archive.

Symmetry is overrated. In fact, according to physicist Frank Close, it doesn’t even exist. Beneath the apparent symmetry of the human body, New York’s Twin Towers, snowflakes and starfish, asymmetry is there, enforcing a universal unevenness necessary for existence. Without it, the cosmos itself would be locked in a kind of plasmatic paralysis, incapable of sustaining life. But to most people, symmetry is balance, equality, beauty and perfection. Scientists seek it in their data and work it into their theories. Religion embraces the symmetry of the Crucifix and the Star of David and shuns it in the deliberate flaws of Shinto temples. Architects build it into their blueprints, from the Pantheon to Yankee stadium.

But life, for all its harmony and balance, hinges on a disruption of symmetry, the slight edge of matter over anti-matter left over from the universe’s origin. Asymmetry through the looking glass is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Frank Close, physicist and author of “Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry.”

At the end of the day, the socio-biologists have been trying to teach us, we humans are biological organisms. To which to a lively opposition keeps retorting: no, at the beginning of the day, we are an evolving animal species, but by the end of the day, we’re something else again. We’re human beings. The social science fight this fall around the study of fierce human behavior among the Yanomami Indians of South America is one more instance of that fierce philosophical fight over the nature of human nature. Are those head-hunting Yanomami warriors acting out a universal human urge to dominate or die? And are we doomed, if that’s so, to tribalism, sexism, racism, ethnic cleansing and war without end?

Is it childish, is it unscientific, to suppose we’re creatures not just of our genes, but of our culture, history and language? And that the sins of our species are social-not biological, and not socio-biological either. The ongoing fight around socio-biology is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Steven Pinker, MIT scientist and author of “The Language Instinct” and “How the Mind Works”

Among tribal warriors along the Amazon River in the high heartland of South America, the anthropologist’s question thirty years ago was: what’s the root reason for fierceness in human societies? Is it nature, or nurture? Genetic programming, or acquired culture? The related question this fall is: what’s the root of fierceness among anthropologists? Napoleon Chagnon was the American scientist who made the Yanomami people of Brazil and Venezuela famous in books and movies as “The Fierce People.” Head-hunting warfare among the Yanomami men, Chagnon decided, was a lively replay of nature’s primeval battle for survival.

But now it’s Napoleon Chagnon who’s getting torn apart in virtually Hitlerian terms by rival scholars who say: no, it’s culture that makes killers, and it was Chagnon with his imported viruses and machetes that nearly ruined the Yanomami. Patrick Tierney’s “Darkness in El Dorado” is this hour, on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Patrick Tierney author of “Darkness in El Dorado”

Did you hear about the other big political showdown last week, far from Florida, that bears on the fate of the earth even more than who the next American president is? The UN global warming conference at the Hague fell apart after 11 days of negotiations failed to resolve the central disputes between European and American negotiators. It might have reminded you more of a Middle East summit. The Europeans blamed the Americans. The Americans blamed the Europeans and the whole thing collapsed dramatically in the middle of the night over the question of whether big industrial countries like the US could apply their abundance of trees as a kind of special discount on reducing fossil fuels.

The game was to get 170 countries to agree to the Kyoto climate treaty, but the only thing anyone could agree at the Hague last week is that the world is heating up. Who killed Kyoto, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Moomaw, Professor of International Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

and Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature” and “Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously”, and writer for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers.

Can we afford to get out of the habit of nuns? In 1965 there were 181,000 nuns in America; today there are 84,000 and their average age is 70. The writer, Lucy Kaylin, wanted to find out what nuns are all about before their numbers disappear all together. Her new book, “For the Love of God” is about the American nun today. She most likely doesn’t wear a habit, she’s probably a feminist who’s vocal about women’s reproductive rights and the ordination of women, she’s more likely to be an activist protesting military intervention or running a homeless shelter than to be cloistered in a monastery.

But why should outsiders be worried about the fate of nuns? Because, says Lucy Kaylin, “now more than ever, our society could benefit from the example of this inviolable sector so untainted by capitalism’s oracular precepts.” Get thee to a nunnery, this hour on the Connection
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Lucy Kaylin, author of “For the Love of God”

Sister Jeanine Gramick

Sister Nancy Shively

Last night George W. Bush was declared the winner of Florida’s presidential election, and therefore president-elect of the United States. But – and it’s a big “but” – Al Gore is determined to contest the election results with a view to overturning them. The difference is a mere 537 votes, and Gore is convinced that those votes remain uncounted in yesterday’s certification. The courtroom conflicts continue, with the Republicans due to argue before the United States’ Supreme Court on Friday that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its bounds, and Gore’s lawyers contesting the results of three counties today.

It may be the court of public opinion that ultimately breaks the electoral tie. George W. Bush has embraced the mantle of president-elect, and hopes to convince a recount-weary populace that it’s time for “closure.” And Al Gore takes the airwaves today to make his toughest campaign speech since the Democratic convention. Contest or concede, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Brooks, editor at the Weekly Standard Magazine

Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs writer for the New Yorker and New Republic magazines and law professor at George Washington University

and NPR commentator Steve Stark.

If David Allen Sibley were a bird he says he’d be a Brown Booby, a Caribbean bird that lives a long life and has few worries. But David Sibley is a rarer bird than that; he’s more like a Kirtland’s Warbler or a whooping crane, the tallest bird around. Sibley has just written what promises to become the new bible of bird watching after Roger Tory Peterson’s definitive “Field Guide to the Birds.” David Sibley has meticulously drawn all 810 species of North American birds. In hundreds of illustrations, he shows America’s birds in flight and in all their plumages. He describes the calls and behavior of each species’, plots their migration routes and breeding locations….

If you’re looking for a Buff-collared Nightjar or a Chuck-will’s-widow; a Magnificent Frigate Bird or a Gilded Flicker, David Allen Sibley can help you track them down. The Birdman is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Allen Sibley, author of the National Audubon Society’s “The Sibley Guide to Birds”

and E. Vernon Laux, author of “Bird News: Vagrants and Visitors on a Peculiar Island”

Edward Gorey the American Genius eccentric. His books are obscure, often morbid and funny at the same time. His stories range from the silly to the surreal to the macabre. An Epileptic bicycle ride, a series of pictures of useful urns, a horrid life and death of a hapless child. They’re often told in rhyme giving even the most grizzly happening a strangely childlike innocence. Edward Gorey wrote and drew his characters with meticulous fine point care. He did bland face humans and other odder things; Human figures with prunes for heads or stranger indistinctly drawn characters with still stranger names.

Sometimes it’s what’s not pictured, a monster always hovering outside the frame about to descend. Like the vague dread that descends on us as we read. So if we’re uneasy, why are we laughing? Edward Gorey in spooky spidery words and pictures is this hour on the connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Edward Gorey