Sylvia’s Plath’s suicide in 1963 at the age of 31 made her an international bestseller, a cult figure, a martyr of the feminist movement, a posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner and the subject of at least 104 books. If she hasn’t yet reached the status of full-blown cultural icon, she probably will when the movie about her life starring Gwyneth Paltrow comes out. When her Abridged Journals came out in 1982, her former husband, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, was criticized for self-servingly omitting/cutting out large portions. His admission that he had destroyed one journal at the time of her death and misplaced another only fueled the feminist argument of a faithless husband silencing his genius wife….

Shortly before his death two years ago, Ted Hughes unsealed the remaining journals and allowed the entire collection to be published. Sylvia Plath, uncensored: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Karen Kukil, Editor of the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and Associate Curator of Rare Books at Smith College. Lynda Bundtzen, Herbert H. Lehman Professor of English at William College

Stephen Jay Gould is the most popular modern guardian not just of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary science, but of the quasi-religious enthusiasm that closes the “Origin of Speech,” where Darwin wrote “there is grandeur in this view of life.” Through 27 years now Steve Gould has written an unbroken series of essays in the magazine Natural History, all under the heading: “This view of life.” Excitement, awe, a certain sentimentality some would say, are the mark of his scientific writing-about the beauty of fossils, about Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or the majestic, improbable continuity of 3-and-a-half billion years of life on earth.

He writes with a connected passion about his Hungarian immigrant grandparents, Grammy and Papa Joe, who landed 100 years ago in New York. Encompassing continuity and change, evolution is the “roots” story write large. Steve Gould’s view of life is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Stephen Jay Gould, the influential evolutionary biologist and professor at Harvard University.

A hot new sound coming out of clubs and bars is the music your Jewish grandmother used to listen to. But Bubby might not think “Havah Nagila” with a heavy metal beat is too kosher. Klezmer is having a kind of second renaissance, with young rock, jazz and classical musicians stretching its limits. The traditional Klezmer sound was born in Jewish shtetls of 19th century Central and Eastern Europe. It was mainly played at weddings: a band of wandering musicians known as Klezmorim adapted folk and dance tunes for clarinet, violin, accordion, and mandolin. After its early heyday in the Tin Pan era of the 1920s, Klezmer began to fade as its Old World dynasties died out and Yiddish culture in America waned….

But by the 1970s groups like the Klezmatics, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, and the Chutzpah Orchestra began reviving their Jewish musical roots, with a spirit of innovation more than nostalgia. The new sound of Klezmer is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Klezperanto: Ilene Stahl (leader, clarinetist), Evan Harlan (accordion, piano, music director), Mark Hamilton (trombone), Brandon Seabrook (banjo, mandolin, guitar), Mike Bullock (bass) and Grant Smith (drums, percussion)

Meantime, Mr. President-elect: here’s what’s been happening in the economy, in your country and in the world at large. The Clinton boom is coming down for a soft landing, or maybe a hard jolt; the growth rate is under 3 percent, going by the third-quarter figures, and falling; exuberance isn’t the problem any more. The mood of America, before the onset of Florida rage, seemed mellow enough and may be again: the referendum results drowned out in that month of presidential tie-breaking point to redirecting the drug war, toward treatment, not prison; people seem to want school reform but not vouchers; they wanted gun control but not gay marriage….

The biggest war in the world is in the heart of Africa-gunmen from 10 nations making a bloody chaos of the Congo. And there’s an Arab-Israeli crackup underway that you can’t ignore even if you wanted to. You’re briefing the next President, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times and Professor of Economics at Princeton University

Gideon Rose, Managing editor of the journal Foreign Affairs

Alan Woolf, Professor of political science and sociology, Boston College

Andy Kohut, Pollster from the Pew Research Center.

The national civics course that we’ve all been taking this semester may have ended with a trick question on the final exam: how does the Supreme Court adminster blind justice when 7 of the 9 judges are republican appointees and when two sons of one justice work for George W Bush’s lawyers and when the wife of another has been screening resumes for a Bush administration. We counted on the courts for justice but we’re going to have to rely on Florida’s Sunshine law to bring the chads to light.

The Florida votes will all be counted, the question is: how will history deal with a Bush presidency if the truth outs that Al Gore got more votes. The Supreme Court seemed to honor a deadline over the right Americans have for their votes to count. “Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision,” the dissenting justices wrote – can we live with it until then? The Supreme Court decision in Bush v Gore is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

It’s the ironies and downright contradictions that leap out of the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. A conservative court that meant to stay out of political thickets and state affairs pushed the Florida Supreme Court aside and effectively picked a president. Because the recount rules in place weren’t perfect, the court said, it would be better to have no recount at all. And because the court itself had stopped the counting last weekend, but hadn’t stopped the clock, it said: alas, there is not enough time left now to do the job properly.

In 65 pages of Supreme Court prose on the split decision, not the least of the ironies is that the memorable, clarion language is not in the majority opinion but the ripping dissent of a Republican nominee Justice John Paul Stevens: we may never know who really won the election, he said. The clear loser is “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” The Bush v. Gore decision is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

There’s another electoral crisis in the world. In Israel, the Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak resigned on Saturday to give himself a clean shot at running again in February — without having to face his Likud rival Bibi Netanyahu. Barak took advantage of an election law that says only Knesset members can be candidates. But out of exile yesterday, Netanyahu declared himself a candidate for Prime Minister and asked the Israeli parliament to wave him into the race. This could be worse than the chad crisis in America — a legal battle to test Israel’s 50 year young democracy….

Ehud Barak was the peace candidate a year and a half ago. He buried Netanyahu on the promise of an accord with the Palestinians. Seventeen months later there’s a new Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, Bill Clinton is leaving Washington and peace is no where in sight. Barak’s Gamble is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gershom Gorenberg, senior editor for The Jerusalem Report and author of “The End of Days:Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount”

and Lee Hochstater, Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post.

Little did William Rehnquist know that he would preside over an impeachment and a presidential election crisis during his tenure as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The question now is, does he want his legacy to rest with a narrowly divided decision that may ultimately decide the presidency? The world waits on the word of the nation’s highest court, holding up transcripts of yesterday’s oral arguments to divine the justices’ intent. The likelihood of an ideologically driven decision threatens both Republicans and Democrats.

Yesterday the liberal bloc on the Supreme Court seemed to be probing for a kind of compromise that could satisfy the Bush team’s equal protection claims by imposing a universal ballot recount standard across Florida’s counties. Will the pressure for consensus override the conservatives’ claims of constitutional conflict? Awaiting the Supreme Votes this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Rich Bernstein, attorney in Washington who clerked for Justice Scalia

Neil Katyal professor of law, Georgetown university and adivsor to the Gore Campaign

and Heather Gerken, professor of Voting Rights Laws at Harvard University.

“We should not be a prominent institution in democracy. We are called in to correct mistakes. When you have to call us in, someone has screwed up.” May it please the court, that was Justice Antonio Scalia testifying to the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward earlier this year. It’s a measure of the irony of this whole election story that Justice Scalia and the people we think of as the most ardent defenders of judicial restraint are leading the judicial revolution against counting all the votes in election 2000.

The Supreme Court is America’s firewall against politics and partisan bickering but on Saturday afternoon after the High Court halted the recount of Florida’s votes against a ticking clock, it started a firestorm of criticism and debate against the only institution with any legitimacy left in the whole election fiasco. Oyez, Oyez now the doors of justice are closed to hear the case of Bush v Gore, can we talk about the Court this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Laurence Henry Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard

Einer Elhauge, Professor of Law, Harvard.

So, on the eve of week six in the aftercampaign, the Gush-Gore presidential contest narrows all the arguments about undervotes and counting deadlines, about protests and contests, to a single decision: it may be remembered as a matter of which court you loved, and which court you hated, which court was the reckless runaway, which court tried to save a stable democracy. Court One was the Leon County circuit bench of Judge Sanders Sauls, who stopped the Florida recount in doubt that it could tip the victory from Bush to Gore. Court Two was the Florida Supreme Court, which said: recount all the votes if necessary to get a clear people’s verdict….

Court Three, at work today, is the US Supreme Court, which stopped the recount on Saturday to hear arguments this morning about which recounted votes may be legal, and about the Florida Legislature’s rules for picking presidential electors. The last legal arguments this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Lani Guinier,Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Akhil-Amar, Professor of Constitutional law at Yale University

John Fund, reporter for the Wall Street Journal