The two new professional sports leagues in America couldn’t be more different.

We have the XFL for our fix of second-tier football and buxom babes, and then there’s the WUSA. It’s womens professional soccer. Called the “world’s premier professional womens soccer league.” A family-oriented concept cast as proof that women too can achieve their dreams. Soccer has long left American men in the dust behind sturdy Germans, brawling Brits, and speedy Chileans, while fickle American sports fans complain “these guys just don’t score enough.”

But a group of cable giants is banking on the appeal of female gold, silver, and bronze medallists from around the world, women whose names will go down in history as 20th century pioneers.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Kate Sobrero, member of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team and the Boston Breakers

Joe Cummings, Breakers’ general manager

Donna DeVarona, founding member of the Women’s Sports Foundation and 1999 World Cup chair;

Jennifer Lee, staff writer for the Sports Business Journal.

The Ramones were fun. They were fast. And they were first.

In a twenty-two year recording career, they produced twenty-one albums. In a fifteen-minute set, they might play fourteen songs. Their sound was the musical equivalent of the sonic boom. And Joey Ramone, the gangly giant who became the voice of punk rock, was their king. Just as he towered above everyone he met, he was almost six-six in stocking feet, he loomed large over an American music scene that had lost its way in the 70s and was getting by on overproduced puffery. Not bad for a misfit from Queens for whom every day was bad hair day.

But that was the essence of punk: A safe harbor for the world-weary and too smart for their own good.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Danny Fields, Ramones manager and the man who got them their first recording contract

Seymour Stein, Founder of Sire Records and the man who gave the Ramones their first recording contract

Hilly Kristal, owner of CBGB in New York City, where Ramones go their start

Deborah Harry, also known as the lead singer of Blondie

Chris Stein, Blondie guitarist

Craig Leon, produced first Ramones album.

Close your eyes and imagine a land ravaged by plague.

Where twenty-five million people are walking slowly to their graves, and each day, more than 15,000 others fall prey to an insidious and deadly disease. It may sound like a slice out of 14th century, but that’s the reality of AIDS in Africa today. On one side, drug companies defending their right to profit even in the midst of a pandemic. On the other, African governments spending scarce resources on guns – not vaccines. African AIDS victims are caught in the middle and the U.S. and other industrialized nations that have the wealth to solve the problem are on the sidelines.

Is AIDS in Africa a crisis without a cure? A problem too big to solve? Fighting AIDS in Africa. A story of politics, profits and promise.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Amir Attanan, Researcher at the Harvard Center for International Development

Dr. Richard Laing, Associate Professor in International Health at Boston University

Susan Finston, Assistant Vice President for Intellectual Property at Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America;

Zackie Achmet, an activist with the Treatment Action Campaign.

Gorazde. If you followed the war in Bosnia, you heard about Gorazde.

A small city deep in Bosnian Serb territory, where Bosnian Muslims were supposedly “protected” by the U-N, and were actually anything but. You may have read about Gorazde, seen a clip of it on TV, heard a report on the radio. But do you have any idea how it felt to be there? You would, if you knew the work of Joe Sacco. Seeing it for the first time, you might think you were looking at a comic book. You are, in a way. Joe Sacco calls himself a “comics journalist.”

For the last ten years, he’s worked in war zones, from the Gaza Strip to Gorazde. He turns that experience into book-length cartoons that tell stories those big-foot, drop-in war correspondents may fail to see.

Guests:

Joe Sacco, author of “Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95″

Scott McCloud, author of “Reinventing Comics”

Joshua Ramo, assistant managing editor of Time Magazine.

The amorphous movement against Globalization.

Thousands of protestors are on their way to Quebec for a three-day face off with 6,000 police and a two and a half mile fence. At issue: the Free Trade Area of Americas. “NAFTA on steroids.” Pick your cause and join the fight: No sweatshops, no corporations, no brand names, no logos. Union organizers, prison-reformers, new-age feminists and punk rockers. There are Marxist and communists. Ruckus raisers and Greens. End world poverty, hunger, and the sanctions in Iraq. You’ve got anarchist people, immigrants’ rights people, save the indigenous people people, and mean people suck people.

Free Tibet and Mumia, and give African nations their medicines. Can there be a movement without a single message? Quebec is preparing for war, and so are the free-traders. But who are they fighting?
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Naomi Klein, author of “No Logo”

Fred Azcarate of Jobs with Justice

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International

Juliette Beck of Global Exchange;

Jia Ching Chen, Director of Just Act and organizer for the Ruckus Society.

The Holocaust. It is the event in modern history that we’ll perhaps never understand: The story of how one of Europe’s most civilized cultures, with malice aforethought, set out to extinguish one of Europe’s most vibrant populations – and succeeded with horrifying efficiency.

More than half a century later, we still ask, Why? The images won’t go away – the camps, the trains, the emaciated bodies and heaps of bones: But neither do the questions… how did it happen and how did it work and what will be transformed from the loss? The Yale University Press has just published a one-volume reference: Death Marches to Death Tolls, Nazi policy to Nuremberg Laws, Terezin to Theological Responses.

But will the facts speak to us? – are we still listening? – This time – will we learn?
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Walter Laqueur, preeminent historian and editor of “The Holocaust Encyclopedia”

Jehuda Reinharz, The Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and the President of Brandeis University

Michael Berenbaum, former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and advisor to “The Holocaust Encyclopedia.”

When do current events end and when does history begin?

Birmingham, Alabama, may be asking itself that very question today, as a former Klu Klux Klan member sits in a city court facing charges of murder. It was September 15, 1963, when the blast at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church ended the lives of four young black girls. History galloped on, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 blooming from the rubble. Slowly but surely, the phrase “civil rights” began to ring with the echoes of distinguished distance. Now a new book resurrects Birmingham from the veil of four subsequent decades. It lays out the confused battle lines in the city’s industrial past. With the so-called Big Mules of business colluding in country clubs to maintain the segregated status quo.

Author Diane McWhorter writes that she grew up on the wrong side of the fight. And her book unravels the history of her city, and her effort to reveal the alleged villain in her own family, her father.
(Hosted by Alex Beam)

Guests:

Diane McWhorter, author of “Carry Me Home”

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, leader of the civil rights movement in Birmingham;

James Parsons, former Chief of Police in Birmingham.

The Paintings of Johannes Vermeer mesmerize the eye and draw the crowds.

What is it about Vermeer? Perhaps it’s the sparse nature of his output. Vermeer lived the credo “less is more.” He painted just three pictures a year when his Golden Age of Dutch Painting colleagues were doing fifty. By dying young he ensured a scarce supply of pictures. Just 35 paintings are attributed to him. Vermeer left no trace of himself. Biographers have to look at his wife’s tax records to get a hint of how Vermeer lived.

Or maybe its just something in Vermeer’s light, flooding through windows onto walls, peeking out behind doors in homes of impeccable bourgeois taste. It is light that is a miracle of painting technique, and a visual harmonic that brings an inner peace.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Anthony Bailey author of “Vermeer, a View of Delft”

and Dr. Alan Chong, curator of the Collection at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

More fighting over night in The Middle East.

The Peace process between Israelis and Palestinians has been in cardiac arrest for six months. It is now flatlining and there isn’t enough charge in the defibrillator paddles to revive it. The Israeli military is bombing Syrian positions in Lebanon and taking land along the Gaza strip. Meanwhile Hamas says it has 100 suicide bombers ready to make Israeli bus stations and market places even more fearful than they already are. Making sense of the Middle East is never easy. One man knows the back story better than anyone: Dennis Ross.

The United States former special envoy to the region knows the players and what really happened at Camp David better than anyone else. The personalities of the players and the prospects for war and peace. Dennis Ross on the Middle East is here.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Former special Mid-East coordinator, Dennis Ross

NPR reporter Jennifer Ludden

Hilary Anderson, the BBC’s middle east correspondent.

Forget reality TV – the real game of Survivor is playing out in Corporate America. It’s all work, no play, and for what? Welcome to the white-collar sweatshop, where the pursuit of the American dream just might be your worst nightmare.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Jill Andresky Fraser, author of “White Collar Sweatshops”