What is it about women and shoes?

We love them, buy them, wear them, and always, always want more. This isn’t so surprising. From an early age we learn that shoes have magical power. They promise romance, excitement and the possibility of transformation. Ruby red flats got Dorothy home to Kansas, a single glass slipper helped Cinderella nab her prince, and just look at what Manolo Blahniks do for those girls on Sex in the City. Shoes have personality, the sexy stilleto, the powerful pump, the sensible loafer. We put them on and become newer, better, different versions of ourselves. We buy more, and we open the doors of possibility even wider.

We’re talking about shoes and the women who love them. We’re looking in closets, fessing up to our fetish, talking fashion with designers, and bunions with podiatrists.
(Hosted by Nina Totenberg)

Guests:

Linda O’Keefe, author of “Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers and More”

Andre Leon Talley, Editor at Large, Vogue;

Stuart Weitzman, shoe designer.

Pablo Escobar. In the 1980’s the head of the Medellin drug cartel was the most powerful criminal in the world.

He had politicians in his pocket and so much money he started burying it in the ground. His trademark method of justice: plato o plomo, silver or lead. You took his bribes, or you took a bullet. He killed Colombian presidential candidates, supreme court justices, and journalists. Members of congress, police chiefs and children. Nobody could stop the demand for cocaine in America, so nobody could stop Escobar’s growing power. He bombed a commercial airplane out of the sky, kidnapped the sons of politicians, and then built his own luxury prison to avoid extradition.

But the US didn’t just want him arrested, extradited, and incarcerated. They wanted him dead. Journalist Mark Bowden tells the story of the Killing of Pablo Escobar.
(Hosted by Nina Totenberg)

Guests:

Mark Bowden, journalist and author of “Killing Pablo”

Today I’m imposing on listeners.

My father has never agreed to sit for an interview with me. Today he has to because I’m hosting the home town show. He was born in Poland on New Year’s Day, 1911. He learned the violin, almost by chance, at age six. He walked on the concert stage at the age of eleven. And this year, to mark his ninetieth birthday, he stood in front of a packed concert hall, and played to rave reviews. His career has played out on the concert stages of the world.

But his greatest impact may be on the thousands of students he’s taught over the years. Go with him as I have to orchestra concerts from Boston to Prague, and when he goes back stage afterwards, he’s mobbed by members of the orchestra who studied with him.
(Hosted by Nina Totenberg)

Guests:

Roman Totenberg, violinist

First rule of Chemistry 101: certain elements combined in specific ways, explode.

First rule of Politics 101: Ditto. Nothing has the potential to blow the dome off the Capitol quite like a Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearing, especially given the right elements: a nominee with something to hide. A politically divided Supreme Court. A Senate judiciary chairman with an agenda and a secret. A public hungry to digest the private lives of public figures. Add to this the most politically incendiary topic of all – the abortion debate. Mix them up, and you get a political Atom bomb.

You also get the latest novel by best-selling author Richard North Patterson. Law, politics, and the challenges of creating fiction where the reality is already so strange, here.
(Hosted by Nina Totenberg)

Guests:

Richard North Patterson, author of “Protect and Defend”

Out of the desert sands she comes.

The Queen of Sheba, exotic enchantress, the mysterious and powerful woman who came to Solomon, peppered him with riddles, showered him with praise and then returned to her kingdom leaving a million myths and fantasies in her wake. The Queen of Sheba gets only minor billing in the Old Testament, 13 lines in the book of Cain, but in a dramatic scriptural promotion, ends up in the New Testament presiding over judgment day with Christ. Today she lives deep in our collective unconscious.

Grandmothers use her to put daughters in their place, marketers use her to sell cat food, and Nicholas Clapp used her to spend four years running around the desert, living like Indiana Jones and writing a book about his search for the fabled Queen. Taking on the Queen of Sheba, the male fantasy and the feminist icon.

Guests:

Nicholas Clapp, author of “Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen”

Carole Fontaine, Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the Andover Newton Theological School, and editor of “A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods, Strategies.”

Dr. Efraim Isaac, director of the Institue of Semitic Studies, Princeton, New Jersey.

Mobutu Sese Seko. His name conjures up the same images time and time again: the leopard hat, the cane, the pink champagne, the jungle palaces.

And beyond that: the Congo. The country he ruled and brought to ruin in the 32 years he was in power. With greed as his polestar and Western power ever at his side, Mobutu plundered his home nation, vastily rich in resources , and turned it into an economic wasteland. Kleptocracy became the word for his government, and when rebel forces toppled Mobutu 4 years ago, “destroyed” was the best way to describe the country he left behind.

Journalist Michela Wrong spent 7 years covering the heart of Central Africa, witnessing first hand the last days of Mobutu’s power. We’ll talk with her about her new book that goes beyond the Leopard’s legacy and into the mind of the man who brought a nation to its knees.

Guests:

Michela Wrong, author of “The Congo: In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz”

Suliman Baldo, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, has been following the Congo for 5 years

Memory. Our best friend. Our worst enemy.

No matter how hard we try to remember, or how hard we try to forget, it always turns out the mind has a mind of its own. From false eyewitness testimony to losing a wallet, from unforgettable trauma to Alzheimer’s disease, the shortcomings of memory are painfully obvious. And even the memories we do keep are often tainted by time, by nostalgia.

A new book by Daniel Schacter outlines the Seven Sins of Memory, the ways our memory lets us down, and the reasons why forgetting is as essential to existence as remembering.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Daniel Schacter, author of “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers”

The auditorium is quiet, the lights come up, and you and the rest of your fourth grade class belts out: “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.”

For a moment, it feels like the whole world is watching. For some that memory fades. For others, it lives, and propels them into a world of church basements, hot glue, do-it-yourself costumes, and find-it-yourself props. This is community theater and it’s the stuff of dreams for many who’ll never know a stage bigger than their local high school.

Leah Hager Cohen spent a year chronicling the people, the pageantry, and the productions of the one of America’s oldest community theaters. She found perfectly ordinary people who are CRAZY about make-believe, obsessed with breaking a leg on the stages, and backstages of community theaters.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of American Community Theatre

Celia Couture, Director of the Arlington Friends of Drama – the theater chronicled in Leah’s book

Also, Special Community Theatre Stars

Journalists, like businessmen, thrive on competition.

But in the newspaper business today, the successes of scribes and suits are often at odds with each other. Newsroom talk is turning from scoops and deadlines, to job cuts and profit margins. Two months ago, Jay Harris, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, resigned, setting off a national conversation among newsies about cutbacks and content, news versus profit. Harris’s decision was a slap to corporate management at Knight-Ridder, as he refused to slash content and staff.

While the words echoing in the boardroom are economic downturn and belt-tightening, many journalists say this is another sign that the almighty shareholders are trumping the Fourth Estate, and stomping on the public trust, our trust, on a gleeful romp down Wall Street.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Jay Harris, former publisher of the San Jose Mercury News

John Morton, newspaper industry analyst

Suki Dardarian, assistant managing editor for metro at the Seattle Times

Gary Pruitt, CEO of the McClatchy Company;

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, how do you want your body cared for when you’re gone?

For centuries since settlement, six-feet under and an epitaph on stone has been the American way. But increases in life-span, environmental awareness, and concern about cost have encouraged more and more modern Americans to return to dust as most Native Americans, Hindus, and Buddhists do, through cremation. Now Timothy Leary’s ashes are shot into orbit and Jerry Garcia’s cremains are spread along the sacred Ganges.

It’s part creation of a culture’s new death rituals, and part secular fad. Whatever your interpretation, we’re witnessing a revolution in how Americans view their body, their soul, and their mortality.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Stephen Prothero, Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston University and author of “Purified by Fire”

Thomas Lynch, Essayist, Poet, and Funeral Director, and author of “The Undertaking” and “Bodies in Motion and at Rest.”