The best writers tell a good story and they make it look easy. Try to do it yourself though and if you get past an opening sentence, you get stumped creating dramatic moments that don’t reek of melodrama, characters that aren’t stick figures, and sentiment that doesn’t come off being sentimental.

Writing programs tell you that good writing can be taught. Novelist and writer Doug Bauer may be more honest in warning that something crucial is born in the writer. There’s a difference between gift and grit, he says, between talent and tenacity.

What you need, at bottom, he says is a fictional imagination – Saul Bellow’s for putting new ideas about humankind into flesh and blood. Or Hemingway’s instinct for writing how people talk by knowing how they think. Then, Doug Bauer says, you have to roll up your sleeves and study “the daily sweaty business of making animate sentences.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Douglas Bauer, author of “The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft.”

The invitation to the composer Osvaldo Golijov five years ago was to write a millennial celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach in a new musical telling of the passion story of the crucifixion of Jesus, from the Gospel of St. Mark.

Golijov seized the opportunity to shift all the perspectives, including his own. He is a 40-year-old Argentinian Jew with Russian and Rumanian roots who’d lived among Catholics all his life and found himself transfixed by the Christian text. But his approach was not Bach’s meditation and comment, but rather enactment and ritual in the Latin and African mode.
Golijov’s Jesus is sometimes a Spanish-speaking black man, sometimes a chorus representing the people transformed into a collective spirit. His musical means include rhumba rhythms with spoons, Cuban drums and Brazilian martial-arts dances. He thinks of it as Jesus’ last days on earth, seen through Latin-American experience.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Osvaldo Golijov, composer of “La Pasion Segun San Marcos”;Robert Spano, Music Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and Music Designate of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Dr. Judah Folkman is the Boston-based researcher who’s become many people’s odds-on favorite in the race to cure cancer. He owes part of his fame to a 1998 front-page New York Times article that hyped his research and swamped his lab with calls from desperate patients.

But the real story of Folkman’s determination may some day one-up the media frenzy. When he was only 28 years old, he fixed on the then-radical notion that cancerous tumors generate and feed on their own networks of blood vessels; and he’s spent the 40 years since working through the implications of that idea.

Folkman’s obsession embroiled him early on in big-league hospital politics and cost him the respect of colleagues who derided his ideas and criticized his experiments. But he can now cure cancer in mice, and he’s still at work on the trickier fix for humans.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Cooke, science writer for Newsday and author of “Dr. Folkman’s War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer”

and Michael O’Reilly, Assistant Professor, Radiation Oncology and Cancer Biology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who discovered several anti-angiogenesis substances with Dr. Folkman

When President George W Bush called Ariel Sharon to congratulate him on winning the Israeli election, he said: “No one would have believed then that I would be president and you would be prime minister.”

There are two new administrations in the power capitals of Washington and Jerusalem now, both more conservative than their predecessors, neither one particularly sworn to peace in the Middle East. George Bush’s Defense Secretary is on the record now as having said that there are more urgent priorities in the region than a final settlement in the West bank.

Ariel Sharon is an Israeli warrior and political veteran identified by many people as the guy who visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem last September and sparked four months of violence. Having said all that though, politicians cursed with low expectations sometimes have a way of defying them too.

Guests:

Gideon Rose, Managing Editor of “Foreign Affairs”

Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist

Bernie Avishai, author of “A New Israel.”

What you see is what you get, we say, but are we seeing or getting even half of what’s out there, or in here? In an overly stimulated visual entertainment world, the passionately observant eccentric, James Elkins, says even though we overlook so many things and shut out most of the world around us, our eyes don’t stop seeing.

The challenge is to train ourselves to use our eyes to see different. In an Old Master painting, he looks through the picture for the craquelure, the fine network of cracks that form on the surface of the paint and tell a story all its own.

Have you noticed how postage stamps are little universes unto themselves, “compressing,” he says, “the larger worlds of art and politics into a square half-inch.” To begin to see the little buds on twigs during winter as “armor plating against the cold.” To notice how intricate and flexible a shoulder is and all the wide variety of shapes the night sky can have.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

James Elkins, Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of “How to Use Your Eyes.”

Here are some fast facts on fast food in America: the average American will eat three hamburgers and four orders of fries this week. 90% of American children between ages three and nine will stop at a McDonald’s this month. 12% of American workers have gotten a paycheck from McDonald’s.

10 percent of the American boy’s calories come out of a soda can. If you can say “two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun,” and most of us can, you know how the selling of fast food has become part of the culture.

But did you know that the beef flavor comes from a chemical factory in New Jersey? Or that McDonalds, with more than 8000 private playlands, has transformed the art of marketing to children? Fast food has retooled our diets, but also the landscape of ranching and labor relations and real estate development. Join us for Eric Schlosser’s bite out of the dark side of the all-American meal.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Eric Schlosser, correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and author of “Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal.”

What does art sound like? Sonic sculptors are creating museum pieces and interactive installations that purposely blur the lines between music, art and seemingly random noise.
The palette is endless: starting with the natural elements of wind and water, the ambient sound of an audience shuffling its feet, industrial percussion, digital samples, radio transmissions, the acoustic and the amplified. Sonic art is meant to be experienced in as many dimensions as possible, including the physical intimacy of sound waves passing through the body.

In the digital age sonic art has become the expressive mode of choice among avant-garde sculptors and composers. Technology can broaden the range and polish the precision of sonic sculpture; it can also threaten the spontaneity of the artist and the audience tuning in to the music of what’s happening in a museum or on the street.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ron Kuivila, sound artist and Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.

Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker made his reputation writing about jazz much as the best players played it: lyrically, individually, ecstatically, in prose that could sound like the music: the “vinegary, dissonant, Gothic” sound, as he described it, of Thelonious Monk; the “dry Boston tone,” he said, of the unearthly Lester Young; the suggestion of limousines and skyscrapers in the later recordings of the Count Basie band; the whooshing smears in the tenor saxophone ballads of Ben Webster “that give one the impression of being suddenly picked up by a breaker and carried smoothly to shore.”

Writing short squibs and long profiles in the New Yorker, Whitney Balliett has been the critic to lean on or contend with for more than 40 years-even as he changed his own mind about legends like John Coltrane, Stan Getz and Miles Davis. Join us for Whitney Balliett’s running history of what he calls “the sound of surprise.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Whitney Balliett, New Yorker magazine jazz critic, author of Collected Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-1999

Most people remember Bing Crosby today as the white crooner who sang White Christmas. He’s a man who’s memories are regulated today to dusty old Holiday albums, Hawaiian novelty songs, and over-emphasized Bs.

But the writer Gary Giddins says that the Bing Crosby we’ve all forgotten was the most influential, the most successful and the most popular performer who dominated American pop-culture for the first half of the twentieth century. As a pioneer jazz singer, Bing Crosby was a musical innovator who hold records for most number one singles, most studio recordings and most popular song.
As an entertainer he was the number one movie attraction, hosted radio’s top music program, and was the epitome of cool. As an innovator he rethought the recording industry, remodeled the film star, and remade the American song. We’re breathing new life into the career of Bing Crosby.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gary Giddins, author of “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940.”

Compassionate Conservatism has gone from campaign slogan to operative idea in George W. Bush’s Washington. A kind of new-and-improved Thousand Points of Light, it means, for centrist Republicans, small government with a big heart.
For the new president, it may be the most radical and controversial idea of his presidency. Just ask the ideologues behind it. Marvin Olasky was born Jewish, became Marxist, and then a born-again Christian from Texas. Myron Magnet a neo-conservative who calls himself a Victorian. Together, they mean to transform America and to save us- from liberalism, from the welfare state, and from all the excesses of the 1960s.

Marvin Olasky says Compassionate Conservatism “will have to cross a river of suspicion concerning the role of religion in America, and only political courage will enable it to carry the day and transform the country.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Marvin Olasky, author of “Compassionate Conservatism” Olasky’s Archives

Myron Magnet, author of “The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass” Myron Magnet’s Publications

David Brooks, editor at The Weekly Standard and author of “Bobos in Paradise.”