The internet is getting self-organized. While conventional online media ventures like CNN.com are choking in the e-business downturn, a new crop of web sites is tapping into the collective wisdom of their users to serve up the freshest material online. Rather than depend on a top-down editorial team, sites like Slashdot, Epinions, The Vines, and Plastic.com rely on a growing community of engaged visitors who post their own thoughts, reviews, opinions, links to articles, and all kinds of current content.

Other visitors rate these items on how helpful or entertaining they are, and the cream of the crop rises to the top. The result is a self-organized website that builds on the best thoughts of its users. Can collective intelligence fulfill the internet’s promise of interactive democracy, or is it just the next stage in the balkanization of our media culture? Reinventing dot communities is here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jon Katz, Slashdot columnist and author of “Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho” and Steven Johnson, Co-editor-in-chief of Feed.com and author of “Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

George McGovern’s favorite comment on his long political career was the New York Times’ observation that “food, farmers and his fellow man” were the foundation stones of his thinking. They still are. Growing up in South Dakota, he saw some of the best farmers in the world flounder in the Dust Bowl.

Nearly 30 years after his anti-Vietnam presidential campaign, it’s the food and farm paradoxes that preoccupy George McGovern: 800-million people in the world are still hungry today, even though the food production grows faster than population. Some of McGovern’s arguments today are with his own grandchildren: on genetic modification of grains, for example. Does high-tech food aid disrupt third-world production? Does the world need a Farmers’ Corp, on Peace Corps lines? George McGovern’s plan to end hunger in our time is here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

George McGovern, former Senator and Democratic Presidential nominee and author of “The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time”

and Peter Rosset, Co-Director of Food First — The Institute for Food and Development Policy

If lyrics were meant to be read, you could deliver them this way: “Strike up the band” “I want to hear a Yankee Doodle Theme” with “three little words” that “accentuate the positive”. “Life’s a song so let’s sing it together” about “a few of my favorite things”, “A cup of coffee, a sandwich and you”.

“I got a right to sing the blues”, “I ain’t got nothin’ but the blues”, “my handyman ain’t handy no more” and “I’m in the mood for love”. “Why try to change me now?” “I’ve got you under my skin” and “it’s never to late to fall in love”. “It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s delectable, it’s delirious, it’s dilemma, it’s delimit, it’s deluxe, it’s de-lovely” and “it’s all right with me”. So “Let’s do it”. “Let’s face the music and dance.” “The joint is jumpin'” and “I’ve got rhythm”, “crazy rhythm”, “fascinating rhythm”; ” what a perfect combination”. “Who could ask for anything more?” We’re reading lyrics here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Kimball and Robert Gottlieb, editors of “Reading Lyrics.”

If Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet can be indicted in Spain and arrested in London on charges of torture and other crimes against humanity in his public career-is it safe for Henry Kissinger to travel abroad? The writer Christopher Hitchens says: it shouldn’t be. Pinochet’s arrest two years ago signaled a new era: when chiefs of state would have to defend their records in world courts.

The Kosovo war underlined the point, we said, that human rights now trump the sovereignty defense: Slobodan Milosevic is subject to arrest for war crimes if he steps out of Serbia. So Hitchens asks: what about Henry Kissinger, who micro-managed the US war in Vietnam, and Laos and Cambodia, for four years after he knew it was lost, at the cost of 20,000 American lives and another million and a half Indochinese fighting men and civilians. The journalist Christopher Hitchens and his case against Henry Kissinger are here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Christopher Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation and Michael Scharf, Professor of International Law at the New England School of Law and former State Department Official under Bush Senior and Clinton

Hatred of Jews is the noxious stream that James Carroll’s big book, called “Constantine’s Sword,” tries to map through Western history. It can look like many histories and many streams: including the imperial Roman conquest of Jerusalem, the Catholic crusades and Inquisition, the explusion of Jews from Spain, the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and catastrophically the death camps of Auschwitz scarcely more than half a century ago.

But in James Carroll’s reading there is one great arc in the story, a single stream that was polluted in the earliest Christian times-not by Jesus but by his first followers, including the Gospel writers, who cast the saviour dramatically as the enemy of “the Jews,” his own people, and set up the Jews to be the victims of Christian history. James Carroll has examined history and his own conscience, and come up with a project to rebuild his Catholic church on its Jewish foundations.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

James Carroll author of “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and The Jews.”

What does it tell you that a leader of a country of continental proportions can be shot dead and the world not know for days whether it was an accident or an assassination, even whether it happened? The leader in question was President Laurent Kabila of Congo, what it tells us is that in the year 2001 the world can still be in the dark, especially about a place Joseph Conrad called the “Heart of Darkness.”

Laurent Kabila’s son Joseph has been declared the new president. Beyond that headline its hard to say who’s really running Congo or even that there’s still a nation there on the battlefields of what Madeline Albright called “Africa’s first World War.” The armies of seven nations have been fighting for three years now for control of Congo’s vast riches in diamonds, timber and minerals. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. Millions displaced. Africa with and without Kabila is this hour, on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Phillip Gourevitch, correspondent for The New Yorker

Michaela Wrong, author of “In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz”

and Chris McGreal, Africa correspondent for The Guardian. Allan Little, Africa correspondent for the BBC. Phillip Gourevitch, author of “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.”

Marjorie Garber is a scholar who’s made a career in academic trespassing. She’s an expert on Shakespeare, but has also written about cross dressing, dogs and the sex of real estate. It’s not professional, some say, but Garber’s line is: look around you-everybody’s into boundary jumping now; not just professional amateurs, like herself, but amateur professionals, like Oprah, the talk show host and literary gatekeeper; or Sister Wendy, the nun who’s become our art history teacher; and, Jesse Ventura, the wrestler who’s Governor of Minnesota.

Academic disciplines, Garber confesses, aren’t disciplined at all, much less pure or stable: economists have invaded social science; humanities professors aspire to philsophy; philosophers aspire to law, and everyone aspires to the new authority of cognitive science. Their jargon tells all, and so does Marjorie Garber, in her expose of “Academic Instincts.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Marjorie Garber, author of “Academic Instincts.”

Greetings Dubya and Bushes all. Welcome to Washington and the inaugural ball. Hello to Laura and each twin, there’s Jeb, Poppy, Babs and kin. Welcome back to the old bush friends – Rummy, Dick, and Matalin. Hey to Colin and Condi Rice, Ashcroft and Norton aren’t so nice. Here come Paige, Evans, and Chao; Thompson, Whitman, but no Chavez now. The Beltway brats call Bush a bore, but wouldn’t Al Gore just bore you more? Dubya’s got a Texas style, the crooked brow, the smirky smile. He’s the country’s CEO.

GM and co. will run the show. But after all, are you sure you won? Five-to-four and the deal was done. Godspeed to good old POTUS Bill, we’ll wave to Hillary on the Hill. Let loose the chad confetti, Betty, Scalia’s pick was born ready. Strike up the band, George get sworn in. The country’s gone Republican.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sally Quinn, author

Evan Thomas, Newsweek columnist

Andrew Sullivan, New Republic columnist.

Don Byron could be mistaken for the Wynton Marsalis of the clarinet: just because he’s a jazz player with conservatory training and classical chops. More nearly he’s Wynton’s worst nightmare: Don Byron rejects the museum school of preservationist jazz altogether. He was first famous in his twenties as “the black guy who plays Klezmer.” He’s shaken that reputation only by mixing and matching categories more provocatively. The aim, of course, is to fly over all the barbed-wire boundaries between the musics of, say, Motown, Mancini, Puccini, and Sly Stone.

The theory is-the impassioned argument in Don Byron’s case-is that good music and great composers, whether in tux or T-shirt, are connected below the level of idiom. In all of opera, Don Byron asks, “is there an aria greater than Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over'” from the pop charts of the American 60s? The eclectic Don Byron and his clarinet are here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Don Byron, clarinetist.

Joseph P. Kennedy is known as the father of America’s royal family. The recent publication of his collected letters reveals the man with owlish glasses was as extraordinary as his famous children. He was America’s youngest bank president, ran a shipyard, became a Hollywood film producer and political insider. After he made his fortune on Wall Street, he went after prestige and got himself appointed Ambassador to Great Britain under FDR. He was famous for refusing to wear knee breeches at court, flattering the queen on her looks, and descending on London society with his glamorous brood of Irish Catholic children.

But on the eve of World War II, he let his isolationist views be known and caused a furor when he told a reporter, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” Knowing his political career was over, he turned his efforts full time to dynasty building and getting his son elected 35th President of the United States.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Amanda Smith, editor of “Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy.” and Nigel Hamilton, author of “JFK, Reckless Youth.”