Over the last half century librarians have strip-mined American history.

Unique collections of newspapers and millions of books were destroyed in the name of preservation, at least according to novelist Nicholas Baker. In a series of articles and now a book, Baker challenges what he says is the misguided belief that old paper is about to crumble. In fact, he says, original documents, even old pulp magazines, are tough and resilient, in better shape, he charges, than the microfilm that was supposed to replace them. Nicholson Baker’s charges of incompetence, greed and foolishness do not fit our image of librarians as custodians of our civilization.

And a director of the Library of Congress fires back, calling Nicholson’s book “an unsubstantiated screed.” Who wants yesterday’s papers?
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Nicholson Baker, author of “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper”

Mark Roosa, director for preservation at the Library of Congress.

On a moonless night more than thirty years ago, a young lieutenant led a platoon of Navy SEALS into a tiny village in the Mekong Delta.

When they withdrew, they left behind the bodies of at least 13 Vietnamese women and children, all unarmed. The lieutenant was Bob Kerrey, who later became a United States Senator and a presidential candidate. There are different versions of what happened: Kerrey and some of his men say they were fired on and fired back, that the death of the villagers was a horrible accident. Others suggest the killing was deliberate: that for the protection of the platoon, Kerrey ordered the women and children rounded up and shot.

Atrocity or accident, the story has re-opened old wounds, re-cast questions about the nature of war, and of heroism. Bob Kerrey and the long shadow of Vietnam here.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Joseph Galloway, author of “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young”

Former Arizona Congressman and Vietnam Veteran Jay Rhodes;

Tom Anderson, Producer for 60 minutes II.

A riddle for you: What rolls over but does not bark, elevates you three feet above the drive-through window at McDonalds, and just keeps getting bigger?

It’s the SUV. Yes, the most beloved and despised of vehicles. The gas-guzzling tanks that people just keep buying. Forget the rising price of gas or the looming threat of global warming. SUV’s are the 21st-century version of Manifest Destiny. Calling all suburban parents: now you too can drive your children along the rim of the Grand Canyon, or click into four-wheel-drive for your trek to the mall. You can conquer the Alaskan tundra or the New York City rush hour. Either way, you’ll tower over the imminent threat of Honda Civic road rage.

It’s a brilliant and telling divergence at the edge of the woods, the split of the popular and the rational. Have you chosen the better path?
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Writer Paul Roberts, whose article “Bad Sports, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SUV” was published in April’s Harpers Magazine

Jerry Hirshberg, former president of Nissan Design International;

Jean Jennings, editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine.

Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The Weakest Link. Survivor.

These Darwinian shows soon may be even more prevalent on television, for better or for worse, if Hollywood’s writers go on strike as early as next week. Imagine life without Sex in the City, ER or Friends. We’d actually have to talk to each other in prime time. Television writers want more credit and compensation for reruns of their work but network moguls proclaim they can fill the airwaves without writers’ talents with additional segments of Boot Camp, Eco Challenge and Chains of Love.

With half the nation glued to the boob tube on any given night is that what we really want on our menu? Perhaps we should give the box the boot. We’re disconnecting your TV here, on The Connection.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Chris Albers, chief writer of the Conan O’Brien Show in New York

Tom Shales, Pulitzer Prize winning TV critic for the Washington Post

Peter Bart, the Los Angeles-based editor in chief of Variety

Frank Vespe, executive director of the Washington-based TV-Turnoff Network

Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. An unlikely pair.

One, a dandified white aesthete, the “undisputed downtown authority on uptown night life.” The other, a just-discovered and talented young black poet. In 1925, the two began a correspondence that lasted more than 40 years, and together, they helped shape and celebrate the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz clubs, art galleries, speak easies served as the stage, with literary circles and a nascent gay scene often the backdrop. Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billy Holiday, and Paul Robeson make up the cast of their many cross-town missives.

But it was a difficult time for whites and blacks to be friends, and some vilified Van Vechten as a Negro wannabe, a profiteer on the booming birth of American black culture. The irony is that it was Van Vechten who fell into obscurity, and Hughes who remains in our minds today.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Emily Bernard, editor of “Remember Me To Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964.”

60 million acres of National Forest. That’s what Bill Clinton set aside in his last weeks as president.

By executive order protecting an area of potential wilderness greater than all the national parks combined. But last month, when Clinton’s so-called road-less policy was supposed to take effect, George Bush put the plan on hold. The problem? What some call the most important environmental proposal in a generation is, in other eyes, a procedural sham, bureaucratic bigfooting from D.C., and now several states are in court protesting the rule.

As timber companies demand reversal. Bush’s decision on whether to take the rule and the fight to Capitol Hill is slated for next week. Until then, America’s roadless forests grow in limbo.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Allan Lance, Attorney General of Idaho

Marty Hayden of Earth Justice

Congressman George Miller (D-CA)

Chris Wood, Former Senior Policy Aide at the Forest Service.

In the decades following World War II, a different kind of war was waged on American soil.

Ignited by a fear of domestic communism and fueled by high-minded moralists, the Red Hunt gave way to a Pink Scare. Lefty academics were walking bull’s eyes, none more so than liberal college professors suspected of homosexuality. And in the sleepy Ivory Tower confines of Smith College, a quiet literature professor was about to become the latest casualty. Newton Arvin aspired to an Emersonian ideal of individual freedom but spent most of his life quietly raging against the prison of his closeted sexuality.

That wasn’t the only paradox: When the morality police came knocking, Arvin opened the door to his friends’ collective demise, too. The tortured, tumultuous existence of The Scarlet Professor is here.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Barry Werth, author of “The Scarlet Professor: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal”;

Ned Spofford, retired Stanford professor and colleague of Newton Arvin.

For a supposedly secret society, it’s pretty damn famous. Skull and Bones.

The name conjures images of naked undergrads ensconced in marble crypts, oddball initiation rites and privileged, powerful white men. Four presidents, including the two George Bushes, a gaggle of Senators, Supreme Court justices, business titans, even the famous peacenik William Sloane Coffin were Bonesmen first. But beyond secret handshakes and candlelit ceremonies, there’s the suggestion of a subterranean path to power. Membership, after all, has its privileges.

But is it an express elevator to prestige’s penthouse, or just a fancy credential to add to your cocktail party introduction? And what really goes on inside that rarefied realm anyway? We’re digging up Skull and Bones.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Ron Rosenbaum, contributor to the New York Observer;

Frank Foer, staff writer with The New Republic.

In the beginning there was George. There was George, and John and Benjamin. Sam, Thomas, and Alexander. So begins America’s creation myth.

Our beloved founding fathers and framers; men who couldn’t tell a lie. But what about their wives, their daughters, their servants, and their slaves? What about the common people who filled the ranks of the Continental Army, or – god forbid – threw their support to the British. There were laborers, seamen, and farmers. There were even pacifists who left the Old World thinking they would never see a war again. A hundred thousand Native Americans had to decide.

Which side were they on? Do you know the whole story about the founding of our country? Do you want to? Mythmaking, myth breaking, and the American Revolution.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Ray Raphael, author of “A People’s History of the American Revolution;”

Paul Lussier, author of Last Refuge of Scoundrels;”

David hackett Fischer, Warren professor fo History at Brandeis University, storyteller and author of “Paul Rever’s Ride.”

American operas and American history have one thing in common.

Most people don’t pay a lot of attention to them. And when you’ve got an American opera on the subject of American women’s struggle for the right to vote, watch out. And I mean watch out! Depending on your point of view, “The Mother of Us All” is utterly wacky or utterly wonderful. It certainly has an all-American lineup. Virgil Thomson wrote the music, Gertrude Stein the libretto. And the main character is Susan B. Anthony. In the 19th century, she was the most reviled and revered woman in America.

Today Susan B. Anthony is remembered mainly as the woman whose face failed to launch the one-dollar coin. But we’re flipping that, to focus on the woman and the remarkable opera about her.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Anthony Tommasini, music critic for the New York Times and author of “Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle”;

John Rodney Lister, instructor at the New England Conservatory of Music;

Mary Loeffelholz, professor of American literature at Northeastern University;

Star Trompeter, who plays Susan B. Anthony in the current production at Harvard University.