Today was supposed to be a day for grim justice.

For closure, and for some, a day for revenge. Execution Day for Timothy McVeigh. Instead, the saga of the Oklahoma City Bombing continues, and the newest villain to emerge from the rubble is the FBI. Lawyers for McVeigh and Terry Nichols are poring over thousands of newly released documents. Withheld from them by mismanagment, miscommunication, or a malicious miscalculation. They’re also considering appeals. As victims and their families wait and watch in disbelief. Congress is aghast as well.

They’re asking, again, “how could this happen at the FBI? How could the country’s top law enforcement agency mess up one of the biggest cases of the century?” We’re watching the detectives amd examining the eroding myth of the G-men.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Rob Warden, Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions

Cate McCauley, who worked with the defense team for Timothy McVeigh;

one of the scheduled witnesses for McVeigh’s execution

Lois Romano, national reporter for the Washington Post who has covered the Oklahoma City bombing for 6 years.

It’s not easy being the only superpower.

First you have your enemies, and then sometimes, even your friends don’t like you. Last week, friends and foes joined forces to kick the United States off the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the Narcotics Control Board. Some say the move was a big win for states like Libya, China and Cuba that twisted the arms of their Asian and African brethren to give the U.S. a high profile hurt. Others say the move was an unexpected slap in the face from our European allies. Namely France, Sweden and Austria, who refused to step down and offer the U.S. a seat.

Whoever’s to blame, the move sent a strong message that when it comes to the U.S.’s superpowering around, the international community is mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. We’re talking about the U.S., the U.N. and sandbox politics in the new age of multilateralism.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Jeswald Salacuse, Professor, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Edward Luck, Author of Mixed Messages, American Politics and International Organization and Director of the Center on International Organization at Columbia University.

Ruth Reichl is different from you and me.

We taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter. She tastes revelation. “Each forkful was like biting off a piece of the sun,” she writes of the scrambled eggs with truffles she ate in Paris more than twenty years ago. Hers are taste buds gifted with memory, eloquence, and a strong democratic bent. Now the editor of Gourmet magazine, Reichl was once a counter-culture hippie, living in a Berkeley commune and trying to reconcile her anti-establishment ideals with her passion for food and writing about it.

As eyewitness to America’s culinary revolution, Reichl also embodied its spirit: celebrating simple pleasures and honest food, and making it safe for the average diner to claim a top table of their own. She was the people’s critic, and she’s our guest.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Ruth Reichl and Colman Andrews, editor and co-founder, Saveur

Journalists are the first brigade of history.

Their records of events become the basis of our understanding, the first pencil-sketch of times past. Journalist Daniel Schorr has become a living history himself, his eyeglasses and tape recorder have appeared behind numerous world leaders for the past fifty-plus years. His scoops and spots and analyses for CBS, CNN, and NPR tread through treacherous and uncharted ground, making Schorr one of the most loved, and hated, journalists of his time. An unlikely amiability with Nikita Khruschev, a “real media enemy” to Richard Nixon, Schorr was at times himself a headline.

His new memoir, “Staying Tuned,” traces his career from the heyday of radio to the pioneer days of television to the world of public radio, with an eye for history that was, for him, a day on the job. 84 years old and still at work.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Dan Schorr, Veteran reporter-commentator, the last of Edward R. Murrow’s legendary CBS team.

It’s science fiction, made real. The stem cell.

A complete, living, working cell, but also a biological tabla rasa. Bathe it in just the right chemical stew, and you can transform it into a heart cell, a brain cell, or any kind of cell you want. Baron Von Frankenstein, move over, we may be on the verge of replacement human organs, grown to order, and new therapies for diseases like Parkinsons, Diabetes and Alzheimers. But there are hurdles for stem cell researchers, and not all of them scientific, they’re also ethical, religious, and political. You see, the very best stem cells come from human embryos, which must be destroyed in the harvesting process.

Stem cells. Their incredible potential, and the choices we face in going from the hope of today to the realities of, someday.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Dr. George Daley, stem cell biologist at the Whitehead Institute, and practicing hematologist at Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Micheline Roth, researcher at Harvard Medical School

Morton Kondracke, Columnist for Roll Call, board member on the Parkinson’s Action Network and the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

One of the truly American forms of music. Bluegrass is for some almost a museum-piece, something to revere, and recreate.

And certainly not to change. Not so for the current maestro of the mandolin, Sam Bush. You may not know the name, but you’ve almost certainly heard his impassioned picking, his adroit accompaniment on one of the couple-hundred rock, jazz, country and yes, bluegrass albums he’s worked on. A former teenage fiddling prodigy, for more than 30 years, Sam has led the fusion among many musical genres. First with his long-time band the New Grass Revival, and in subsequent collaborations from Nashville to Telluride to Nepal.

His works win Grammy nominations in the categories of bluegrass, country, and classical. Frontman or sideman, Bush makes whipcracks of sound with fingers a-blur and strings a-singing. Bluegrass and beyond, with Sam Bush.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Sam Bush, mandolinist, violinist, and musician for the ages.

All of us remember a time or place charged with nostalgia, that misty emotion of longing for things past.

Nostalgia is less memory, though, than fantasy-an idealization of the past that, Svetlana Boym says in her new book, can demean the present and hold it hostage. She argues we’re besotted with nostalgia, plagued with it, as we leave the 20th century, with its Gilligan’s Islands and its Guadalcanals behind us. From Jurrasic Park, to the latest Disney animation, to Titanic, to the “Greatest Generation” World War Two best-sellers of Tom Brokaw and Stephan Ambrose, the nostalgia industry has got our number.

Nostalgia is a marketing miracle, and also a dictator’s dream, as the Balkan horrors have recently shown. Nostalgia can lend a sentimental alloy to nationalism and a rosy hue to group hatred. The past, the present, and the Future of Nostalgia.
(Hosted by David Ropeik)

Guests:

Svetlana Boym, author of “The Future of Nostalgia” and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University.

It used to be there were plenty of magazines writing about big ideas but this was before big publishing.

Scan the news racks today and you’ll find magazines for almost every product imaginable, but no big ideas. But if you keep looking, maybe in that pile on the floor or maybe on the bottom shelf along the back wall, you just might find where they keep the little magazines. There’s nothing new about little magazines, they have a tradition and history.

But there is something different about the new breed. The Baffler, the Hermenaut, Open Letters, these are magazines unabashedly taking on subjects like philosophy and cultural criticism. These are magazines printing hypothetical histories and intimate personal letters. Little magazines with big ideas.
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

Tom Frank editor/publisher of The Baffler

Josh Glenn, editor/publisher of The Hermenaut;

Paul Tough, editor of www.openletters.net.

The papacy of John Paul II was different from the moment it began, twenty-three years ago.

He was the first non-Italian Pope. He came from Poland, a country that seemed, at least at the time, entrenched in the Eastern European communist bloc. That bloc has crumbled, in part through the Pope’s efforts and, he would say, his prayers. And now, John Paul is tackling something tougher than political ideology. He’s trying to bridge a chasm between religions.

In the past week, he reached out over a gap of a thousand years in Greece to try to heal a rift within the Christian faith, the split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Far from an easy task. Then, in Syria, he became the first Pope ever to worship in a mosque. The scars of the Crusades and the politics of apology, the Pope’s Journey to Reconciliation
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

Tom Groome, professor of Theology at Boston College

Toula Vlahou, reporter based in Athens, who covered the Pope’s visit for the Boston Globe and for CBS Radio

Father Robert Stephanopoulos, Dean of Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity

Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain to Georgetown University;

Helen Whitney, producer of Frontline’s “John Paul II: The Millennial Pope” documentary.

They started in 1939 in Talladega, Alabama: A quintet of little boys with big voices and a passion for Gospel music.

In the Deep South of the 30’s and 40’s, Gospel quartets and quintets were a dime a dozen, but the boys from Talledega weren’t like the others. By 1950 they were touring from one gospel “hoe-down, get up and testify” tent-revival to another under the name “The Five Blind Boys of Alabama,” because not a single member of the group, who met at the Talladega School for the Blind – could see. They’re the real deal, as much a part of Gospel history as Mahalia Jackson or the Soul Stirrers.

They’re the grand-daddies of Gospel, the septuagenarians of spirituals, and on their new album, their 22nd, they’ve added new songs by Tom Waits and Ben Harper. They’re here, in our studios. It’s the Blind Boys of Alabama.
(Hosted by Jack Beatty)

Guests:

The Blind Boys of Alabama: Clarence Fountain, Joey Williams, Jimmy Carter, and George Scott.