Death is everywhere and nowhere in our society. Children see thousands of deaths on television before they’re ten, but rarely see an actual dead body, even at funerals. The same goes for grown-ups.

We watch movies that eroticize violent death and TV shows that sentimentalize hospital room leave-taking. It’s been a century since most Americans viewed dying as a normal part of life. These days, old age itself is both hidden and up front. Medicare, prescription drugs and Social Security fill the headlines. Yet old people are tucked away, gray hairs camouflaged.

For all the books that tell people how to cope with the emotions of death and dying, few focus on the gritty details of the process itself.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Donald Murray, author, “My Twice-Lived Life” and Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author, “How We Die.”

Sanctions have been used on the global playing field since nation-states existed, but they’ve never been so popular as they are today. For a long time, sanctions were considered foreign policy freebies, a safe middle ground between going to war and doing nothing.

But in an increasingly globalized economy, there is a healthy dose of sanction skepticism. Big business insists that sanctions, especially unilateral ones, cost them Big Money. And there are humanitarian concerns and questions about who gets the U.S. door shut on them and who doesn’t.

Some experts say, plain and simple, that sanctions work and we need them. The promise and problems of sanctions.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Brenda Shaffer – Research Director of the Caspian Studies program at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

Meghan O’Sullivan, expert on economic sanctions and a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington

and Richard Nuccio, Director of the Pell Center, Salve Regina University, and former special advisor to President Clinton on Cuba.

The classic prescription for anxiety is to let a smile be your umbrella. Most Americans put a lot of energy into being upbeat, but some psychologists are starting to preach the power of pessimism.

Worrying about the worst case, they say, might just be the best way to win friends and influence people. Good pessimism is just good planning. So Woody Allen, the defensive pessimist, is right to assume disaster, and Kathy Lee Gifford needs an attitude adjustment.

Wipe that smile off your face, we’re taking a stroll on the stormy side of the street.
(Hosted by Eddie Mair)

Guests:

The image of a computer hacker tends toward the antisocial, the apolitical; the quiet guy with thick glasses and stutter, who has the technical genius to break into the Pentagon’s website and the political consciousness to post pornographic pictures.

Recently, hacking has grown up and gone political. It’s called hacktivism, and its web warriors are staking out a new frontier in a virtual democracy. Software called FloodNet enables virtual sit-ins. “Peekabooty” allows web-surfers in China to evade government censors.

Hacktivism is far from a unified front. Debates that arose back in the ‘We Shall Overcome” era are popping up again in digital format. Hacktivism – electronic vandalism or wired democracy?
(Hosted by Eddie Mair)

Guests:

Tim Jordan, sociologist at the Open University

Oxblood Ruffin, “foreign minister” of the Cult of the Dead Cow

and Carmin Karasic of the Electronic Disturbance Theater

Fly me to the moon. I’ve got you under my skin. The lady is a tramp. How long has this been going on? We hear the words, and we hear the music too.

The lyrics from the Great American Songbook linger in the mind. Can’t go on, everything I have is gone, stormy weather. There’s a reason these lovely words, from the ’20s to the pre-rock-and-roll ’60s, keep ringing in our ears. They follow a formula, as strict as a Shakespearean sonnet. Thirty-two bars, a set rhyme scheme, a verse that serves as an hors d’oeuvre, a chorus as satisfying as dessert. Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you.

Out of the strict confines of structure come miracles of concision, songs that bring pure pleasure. We’re learning the tricks that make those lyrics sing, forever and a day.
(Hosted by Tom Askbrook)

Guests:

William Zinsser, author of “Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and their Songs;” Jack Perricone, songwriter and chair of the Songwriting Department, Berklee College of Music.

We’re in the middle of a wireless revolution, we’re told, but where is it going and who’s in charge? Wireless was born in a wild gold rush that cut our umbilical cord to the telephone line. Now cell phones are the most popular consumer product in America, and a whole new generation of wireless services is struggling to take hold.

TV ads tell us daily that soon we’ll be able to do about anything, wireless, from the middle of the Kalahari, or anywhere else. But take away the hype, and the speculative fever that has marked this industry from the beginning and it’s not at all clear just how imminent or even certain this wireless future is.

Despite the industry’s promises, wireless wanna-be’s are stuck for now, with blackberries, palm pilots and cell phones that work, except when they don’t.
(Hosted by Tom Ashbrook)

Guests:

James Murray, author of “Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution in America”

and Paul Boutin, a senior editor at WIRED magazine.

If you’re too young to remember rotary telephones and manual typewriters, you may be surprised that, not long ago, office buildings had windows that opened, that on very hot days people got sent home from work or school, and that sometimes you went to the movies, not to see the show, but to come into the cool of that Frigidaire air conditioning.

AC was a luxury, not a necessity. But today, we’re migrating massively to man-made climate. In the last twenty-five years, air conditioning has become a way of life. Americans are retreating to hermetically-sealed comfort zones, where summer breezes are a distant memory and you never smell a rose.

We’re cool as cucumbers, but at what cost? We’re chilling out today and considering what’s cool and uncool about air conditioning.

Guests:

Michelle Addington, associate professor of architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design;
Gail Brager, professor of architecture, Building Science program, University of California Berkeley, developed new standards for operable office windows for ASHRAE, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers;
William Stern, Houston architect, principal of firm of Stern and Bucek.

It’s the movie took America upriver into the jungles of the Vietnam war, and left us there.

Apocalypse Now came to the screen in 1979 as furiously as Colonel Kilgore’s helicopters, leaving viewers flailing in the wake of its surreal depiction of an all too real war. Twenty-two years later, an expanded version of the film is on its way, with the horror alive and in super-charged Technicolor. It’s all there: Captain Willard’s mission to “terminate” the craven Colonel Kurtz, Wagner and the waves and napalm in the morning, the boat, and, of course, the river, snaking up to Cambodia, seeping into our souls.

The war of Apocalypse Now had no heroes, no glory, only men and their madness. The heart of the movie hasn’t changed. Have we?
(Hosted by Tom Askbrook)

Guests:

Vittorio Storaro, Cinematographer of Apocalypse Now

Kenneth Turan, LA Times Film critic

and David Halberstam, journalist and author of “The Best and the Brightest” and the upcoming sequel “War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals.”

When it comes to immigrant workers, American labor unions have always said vamos, but now they are crooning mi casa es su casa.

Maybe it’s because NAFTA changed the economic ground rules. Or maybe it’s because union membership is at an all time low. Whatever the reason, U.S. union bosses have had a major change of heart. They are embracing undocumented workers, recruiting them into their rolls, and even pressing Washington to issue an amnesty to more than three million Mexicans living and working illegally in this country.

Union leaders could be getting ahead of the rank and file who, fearing for their jobs, may not be ready to embrace their new Mexican companeros.
(Hosted by Tom Ashbrook)

Guests:

John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union

Professor James Green, historian at the College of Public & Community Service, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Gustavo Mohar the General Director for Migrant and Consular Affairs in Mexico’s foreign ministry.

One Cuban boy plucked from the sea, and a world of attention on the Cubans of Miami.

Writer Ana Menendez watched the community she once covered as a journalist transformed, in the media spotlight, into passionate, unreasonable cartoon figures waving hands in the air. Now a fiction writer, Menendez penned a book of short stories to recapture the subtleties of Miami Cubans and explore her own heritage. The collection is titled “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.”

In the stories, the characters’ sorrows and manias leave them with one finger on the island and one foot in the sea. Elder generations watch their children slip away, only to find that Cuba lives on in all of them.
(Hosted by Tom Ashbrook)

Guests:

Ana Menendez, author of “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” and Isabel Alvarez-Borland, professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross and author of the book “Cuban-American Literature of Exile.”