When we think of the great short stories, we think of Chekhov, Joyce and Hemingway. The editor of Houghton Mifflin’s annual Best American Short Stories this year, E.L. Doctorow, says the short story writers of today are different. They are “drifting away from the classic model of the modern short story,” he writes, and “more disposed to the episodic than the epiphanic.” Contemporary stories remind him of 19th century stories. They’re longer, more dramatic and their meanings not hard to grasp. What we like best about the short story – both old and new – is that it can be savored in one sitting – on a subway ride, or before bed.

The writer Ursula LeGuin thinks of them as carrrier bags. “Like bellies or baskets,” she says, “like houses or wombs, like the great sac of the cosmos itself, they are containers for holding something vital.” Celebrating the story, this Thanksgiving, this hour on the Connection
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has written history and lived his politics with Justice Holmes’s lust for the passion and action of his time. As the son of a famous historian he got a princely head start in the realm of books, argument, social analysis, and political activism. He had the faculty club version of celebrity power from the start, and he made the most of it. He was still in his twenties when he turned our seventh president, “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson, into a modern best-seller and a model of American democracy. It was a model that Schlesinger extended through his chronicles of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Kennedys’ New Frontier.

He’s been the gunslinging guardian all the while of capital “L” Liberalism: an eternally reviving ideal of anti-radical progressivism–the vital center, he calls it, that made enemies of Henry Wallace and Joe McCarthy. At 83, firing real bullets in his memoirs, Arthur Schlesinger is with us, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arthur Schlesinger, historian and public intellectual, special assistant to JFK, and author of “A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917 – 1950″

If you’ve never gotten over your relationship with Holden Caulfield, say, and can’t for the life of you remember the name of whoever it was that shared your first real kiss, you’ve had the experience that Anne Roiphe writes about. She is ever and always infatuated not just with Holden, the heroic anti-phony and prophet of Sixties rejectionism; she’s in love with Hemingway’s wise and doomed alter ego in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, an American of conscience in the Spanish Civil War. She’s in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, still more with John Updike’s horny, hapless Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, “sweetheart of mine,” Anne Roiphe writes, “despite it all.”

Think about your own literary crushes: it could be Harry Potter, Jane Eyre, Nick Carraway, Bridget Jones, Lancelot, Isabel Archer, King Henry the Fifth, Daisy Buchanan. Falling in love with just a book in your hands is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Anne Roiphe, author of “For Rabbit with Love and Squalor”

Yesterday Al Gore and George W. Bush had their day in Florida Supreme Court, or at least their lawyers did. Soap operas and talk shows were bumped for national media coverage of the feature-length hearing, and the dramatic potential was high. The question before the court was whether to allow the ongoing manual recounts to be included in Florida’s official vote certification, and the court’s decision may well decide the winner of the Presidency. The seven Florida justices, all but one appointed by Democratic governors, peppered lawyers for both sides with queries about Florida statutes and case law, revealing the tension between a rigid Republican interpretation of election law and an expansive Democratic one.

The essential arguments boil down to two main ones: a deadline is a deadline, and a vote is a vote. The question for the rest of us is, when is enough enough? Interpreting Florida law is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Einer Elhauge, Harvard Law School

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School

When will election 2000 be over? When someone gets 270 electoral votes. When will that be? When the Florida results are certified. When will they be certified? When all the votes are counted. Who’s stopped counting? Florida’s secretary of state Katherine Harris. Who’s still counting? The three counties of West Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade. Why are they recounting? Too many unpunched or underpunched ballots, too many double punched or blank ballots. How many ballots are being manually recounted? 1.6 million. Who’s ahead? George W. Bush by 930 votes….

Where did he get the new votes? Overseas absentee ballots that were certified over the weekend. What about Al Gore? He picked up a few dozen votes in the recounts. What happens next? Everyone’s due back in Florida Supreme Court today at two o’clock. Who won the Seminole’s/Gators game? Now that’s a good question. Week three of Indecision 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jeffrey Rosen, Professor of Law, George Washington University

Walter Dean Burnham, Professor of Political Science, University of Texas.

Joe DiMaggio played baseball majestically, all but perfectly. In thirteen magic Yankee seasons, DiMaggio’s 9 World Series and 8 championships were a baseball record that may be untouchable like his basehits in 56 straight games in 1941. And the records pale before people’s memories of DiMaggio’s grace in centerfield, his competitive fire at bat. Of the five things that a ballplayer must do-run, field, throw, hit and hit for power–his biographer Richard Ben Cramer says DiMaggio was the first ever who was brilliant at all five.

When he quit playing baseball in 1951, he played Joe DiMaggio, Mr. Coffee, Mr. Marilyn Monroe-a private man in many stages of public pain till his death last year: he was peevish, silent, priapic, jealous, greedy, vain, lightly mobbed up, Ben Cramer says, and deeply unhappy about the life story that he didn’t want to tell, and didn’t want Richard Ben Cramer to tell either. “The Hero’s Life” is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Richard Ben Cramer, author of “The Hero’s Life”

Presidential politics ad nauseum: The count goes on. And the lawsuits, and the spin. Both camps have hardened around polar positions: Democrats insist that the manual recount continue, and claim that it is the only just way to determine the winner of the Florida vote; Republicans are adamant that Bush already won the vote as well as the machine recounts and that hand-counting ballots in only Democratic counties is patently unfair. An irresistible Democratic force is about to meet an unmovable Republic object, in the form of Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

The quickening pace of court appearances and press conferences add to the partisanship atmosphere, and the likelihood that the losing candidate’s supporters will say an injustice has been done. Republicans have already impounded 78 chads as evidence of the flaws and potential fraud in the hand-counting process. Is there an outcome and a process yet we can accept? This hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Neil Katyal, professor of law at Georgetown University and Einer Elhaug from Harvard Law School

Bill Curry, former personal counsel to President Clinton

and Tucker Carlson, writer for the Weekly Standard.

The next environmental movement will need a new look based on a new idea, Bill Shutkin says. Not trees and Ansel Adams mountainscapes in the background, but city scenes with city people in them, de-leaded urban gardens breathing free of diesel bus fumes. There will be recovered brown-fields in the picture, and factories rebuilt on sustainable designs. The next environmental movement will be in the cities, he says, because that’s where a disproportionate share of the poisons and the people are. But it’s where the politics could be promising, too, on a different design to protect the human habitat.

The load that has been borne by Federal regulation and lawyers has got to be picked up by grassroots activism. It’s not greenspace so much as participatory democracy that’s at stake. It’s urban realism more than nostalgia that’s got to drive a tough new crusade. William Shutkin’s sketch of civic environmentalism is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Shutkin, founder of New Ecology, Inc., lecturer in Urban Studies at MIT, professor of law at Boston College, and author of “The Land that Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century”

and Jane Jacobs, author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

Can we laugh yet about the Florida fiasco? Campaign 2000 was already a bonanza for late-night comedy, and now they’ve hit the jackpot. Did you hear that Al Gore is volunteering to hand count all the ballots in the country? And those elderly Floridians voted for Buchanan on purpose. They thought it was James Buchanan. And just how is it that they poked the wrong hole in the ballot yet can still play 9 bingo games simultaneously? On the streets of Miami, prostitutes are offering $20 hand counts, and George W. Bush said if the Democrats don’t stop suing, he’d start executing a prisoner every hour.

The law of diminishing returns has set in and we’re all experiencing Electoral Dysfunction. Perhaps the lesson is that America can live without a president. Election 2000 was a joke, on us perhaps, with a serious question…who got all those chads pregnant in the first place? The punchline to campaign 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Kate Clinton, comedian

Jim Morris, impersonator

Former Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan

Vice President Al Gore

and Texas Governor George W. Bush.

“I dislike them all equally,” wrote an English general during the 30-year British Mandate over Palestine after World War I. “Arabs and Jews and Christians, in Syria and Palestine, they are all alike, a beastly people. The whole lot of them is not worth a single Englishman.” In victory over Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Turks, Britain had taken Palestine in 1917…because it was there, really; not for economic or strategic benefits. Palestine was an emotion, not a reality, a mixed emotion that Arabs and Jews in Palestine both thought they could play for independent sovereignty.

Tom Segev’s intimate history of Palestine under the Mandate argues that the British rule from which Israel snatched its identity was, in fact, a crucial blessing for the Jewish state. It was a time of illusion, he writes, in which the British fooled Arabs, Jews and themselves about the seeds of statehood and hatred taking root. “One Palestine, Complete” is this hour, on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Tom Segev, author of “One Palestine, Complete,” “1949: The First Israelis,” “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust” and columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.