The line between childhood and adulthood has perhaps never been quite as distinct as in a work by Norman Rockwell.

But a lot has happened since the paint dried on those Rockwell canvasses, and the line that separates the mature from the innocent is blurrier than ever. A Rockwell painting today might show a child at home, logging onto the family computer, into a world never depicted in Rockwell’s time: Teen Sex, Child Porn, Three Way Sex, Lesbian Sex. In the balm of a summer holiday once created to take children out of school so they could work on the family farm, the online connection brings, along with the promise of knowledge, a feeling of helplessness. A new study says that one in five children on-line has been sexually solicited, 25% have received unwanted pornographic material, and neither parental supervision nor on-line filters can help.

Online pornography is as much a fact of adolescence as the pizza parlor and learning to drive. How our children’s world is losing its innocence. How parents and children can.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Janis Wolak, from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire

The Reverend Lena Breen, Director of the Department of Religious Education of the Unitarian Universalist Association

and Kiku Adatto, Sociology Professor at Harvard University.

Most of us know what it’s like to be lost in a maze, metaphorically at least.

The mother of all mazes may be the labyrinth built to house the Minotaur, that nasty creature from Greek mythology who munched annually on the youth of Athens, until Theseus fought and killed him. In the Middle Ages, many cathedrals in France and Italy had two-dimensional labyrinths embedded in the floor of the nave, sometimes with images of the hero Theseus and the Minotaur in the center.

But following the Enlightenment, most of those sacred labyrinths were removed, and dismissed as so much superstition. Today, the labyrinth has had a resurrection of sorts, with people turning to walk its coils, to find solace or inspiration.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Craig Wright, professor of the history of music at Yale University and author of “The Maze and The Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music”

and Dr. Lauren Artress, creator Veriditas, the World Wide Labyrinth Project.

Ever since the Pinto went pyrotechnic some twenty plus years ago, sales of little cars have been in a big decline.

They’re all right for grad students and tree huggers and the budget conscious, but for the majority of this country’s drivers, the wee ones just won’t do. Size matters. So do speed, performance, and flash. Who cares if you risk getting stuck in the drive-thru en route to those Biggie fries? But there’s more to little cars than just fuel efficiency, though that’s no small thing in a land of rising gas prices. And, increasingly, there’s style, hipness, and fun.

And thanks to new technologies: hybrid engines, fuel cells, electric motors, to name a few, there are new reasons to think small. How about a tax credit for downsizing your car? Or the promise half-priced parking? The Connection is looking under the hood of the latest little cars.
9Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Csaba Csere, editor in chief of Car & Driver magazine

Tom Corbin, Vice President, Corbin Motors

Bernard Robertson, Senior Vice President for Research, Technology & Engineering at Daimler Chrysler

and Chris Tyrell, owner of Tyrell Automotive, a Smart car dealership, in Buckingham, England.

After his legendary, incendiary father passed away in 1997, Nigerian saxophonist and bandleader Femi Kuti inherited both the legacy of his Afrobeat music, and the cause of his protests.

The task before him was “to become greater than my father” as he put it was multifold. First, to carry on the Afrobeat tradition Fela Kuti created; a synthesis of traditional African rhythms and American soul and jazz. Also, to wed that music to the protest that made Afrobeat a voice for millions of Nigerians, and other Africans, challenging corruption and the repression. Femi Kuti’s music is proof that celebration and political consciousness can rev the masses, and the connosieur of complex, intricate rhythms.

He’s currently touring America with his 15 piece band Positive Force. From Lagos, and into legacy, musician and heir to the Afrobeat throne, Femi Kuti.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Femi Kuti, musician

Global warming sometimes seems like a political issue, or perhaps an economic one, if you’ve observed recent headlines of President Bush butting heads with European leaders.

But behind the heat and the very little light of “global warming realpolitik” is the science. Turns out, that’s also messy. Global warming research is one of the biggest scientific pigpiles of our time. All over the world, climatologists and biologists, meteorologists, geologists and physicists are drilling ice cores in Antartica and measuring rain fall in Bangladesh.

They’re taking temperatures 2,000 leagues under the sea, and going into space, trying to find out how the climate is changing, what’s causing it, and what, if anything, we can do about it. Today, we’re peeling back the politics, and asking scientists for the bottom line on Global Warming.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dan Schrag, Professor of Geochemistry, Harvard University

Bill Moomaw, International Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

and Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

You go to bed with someone you think you know, and you wake up to discover it was someone else.

The surprise bedmate could be another man or another woman, or a man instead of a woman, or a woman instead of a man, or a god, or a snake, your mother or father. No, it’s not a hangover. You, my friend, have experienced what’s known as the Bedtrick. Bedtricks are rife in literature and art, from mythology to movies. Think Leah and Rachel in the Bible, films such as “Some Like It Hot” or “The Crying Game.”

Tales of the Bedtrick can be found in almost every culture, says scholar Wendy Doniger. She’s written the definitive book on bedtricks, lifting the covers on what they have to say about whom we sleep with and how that defines who we are.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Wendy Doniger, author, “The Bedtrick,” Mircea Eliade professor of the history of religions, University of Chicago Divinity School.

One in Ten Americans suffers from some form of mental illness.

Brother, wife, mother, son, or neighbor, someone you know, someone you love, maybe you yourself. Our response as a society has been increasingly fragmented. Thirty years ago, the mentally ill, the visibly mentally ill, were locked up and over-medicated. Then, when warehousing was deemed unacceptable and the hospitals shut, thousands of untreated mentally ill wound up on the streets. To suffer a mental illness today is to play a game of chance between doctors, health care programs, and statistics that favor either the wealthy or those lucky enough to have a caregiver who stays involved.

The Connection looks into what happens when a system is in crisis, and what the mentally ill themselves are doing bout that crisis.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Dr. Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Paul Appelbaum President-elect of the American Psychiatric Association and Professor of psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Medical School

Mo Armstrong A person with schizophrenia who is now working for Vinfen Coorporation, a mental health agency. He is on the National Board of National Alliance for the Mentally Ill

Dr. Laurie Young Senior Vice President of the National Mental Health Association

The pocketwatch starts to swing back and forth.

The man in the white coat intones, “you’re feeling sleepy, very sleepy.” Soon you’re walking across the stage wearing nothing but a tutu, clucking like a chicken. Or at least that’s the image hypnosis used to hold. Today hypnosis has moved off the stage and into the mainstream of medicine. Doctors of all stripes are using it do everything from treating asthma and getting rid of warts, to helping patients quit smoking, reducing pain during childbirth, and perhaps, recovering lost memories.

But while evidence of the beneficial effects of hypnosis abounds, our understanding of how it works hasn’t advanced much beyond Franz Anton Mesmer and his theories of animal magnetism in the early nineteenth century.

(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Harold Zamansky, Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. Carol Ginandes, Clinical Psychologist and Instructor at Harvard Medical School

Call it Round 2. On June 8th Mohammad Katami was re-elected as president of Iran.

Not only winning the match with more than 75% of the country’s votes, but showing the world that reform is part of the country’s lexicon. But he’s beginning this term cautiously. Although his last presidential stint inspired a surge of cultural freedoms, they were ultimately squelched by the country’s clerics, who stand in their conservative corner ready to pounce again. But freedom’s been tasted by the youth of Iran, and they are on the sidelines rooting for Khatami to bring it back. Also in the audience is the USA, placing their bets on the renewal of economic sanctions for a country they see as Satan’s playground. Even if it’s image is starting to represent Democracy.

Also in the audience is the USA, placing their bets on the renewal of economic sanctions for a country they see as Satan’s playground. Even if it’s image is starting to represent Democracy.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Farideh Farhi, political scientist and Adjunct Scholar at the Middle East Institute

Professor Ali Banuazizi, teacher of Iranian History at Boston College, former editor of The Journal of Iranian Studies. Ambassador Robert Pelletreau, former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and chairman of the American Iranian Council.

The folk singer is an American icon.

One who seems sometimes to have been born and died in popular culture within two decades, between 1950 and 1970, killed off by the electronified amplifications of rock and roll. Well, history, including music history, is written by the victors. Sometimes forgotten now is a huge part of the soundtrack of the 1950s and 60’s that borrowed heavily from the union hall songs, abolitionist anthems, race songs, and chain gang melodies of times past. These were the songs that a shrink-wrapped, subububan young America looked to in protest and passion as The Cold War dawned in America, as pop music and politics clashed in the smokey coffeehouses of Greenwhich Village, Cambridge, and Chicago.

We’re having a revival of the Great American Folk Boom.
(Hosted by Jacki Lyden)

Guests:

Scott Alarik, folk writer

and Tom Paxton, folk singer.