Latin. Call it pretentious. Call it confusing. But don’t call it dead.

The original language of pre-exam sweats appeared headed for the back of the stacks just a few years ago, disappearing like the Roman Empire of Virgil’s day. If students were going to study languages, the thinking went, why would they choose one that no one speaks? But the word from Academia is that Latin lives, again. This time around, the Classics department is a bit harder to classify. Don’t expect the stooped, snarling masters of memorization who once prowled the prep school common room in their patched tweed jackets.

Students today, we’re told, are embracing Latin, happily turning the pages of the Aeneid. But today’s Latin isn’t what it used to be. It’s been to the spa. It’s had a makeover. It’s alive.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Tom Sienkewicz, Minnie Billings Capron Professor of Classics at Monmouth College and Chair of the Committee for the Promotion of Latin

Peter Cohee, Classics Department Program Director at Boston Latin School

and Barbara Bell, creator of Minimus, a Latin curriculum for grade school children.

The U-S Army’s latest recruiting mantra begs young Americans to join up and become “An Army of One.” This slogan intends to do more than developing self-reliant soldiers out of gen-y slackers; it presents a new vision for the military itself. Brass and politicians are set on making every branch of the armed forces smaller, quicker and more lethal, not to mention less expensive.

The problem is, these soldiers may be an army of one, but they often bring along a family of four to the nation’s run-down bases. They want decent schools, stable schedules, paychecks that keep them off welfare, and maybe even a sense of purpose.

As Capitol Hill considers a $32 billion dollar increase for the Pentagon, we explore quality of life and clarity of mission for men and women in uniform.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Andrea Stone, reporter with USA Today

Joyce Raezer, Vice President, National Military Family Association

and David Segal, Director of Center for Research on Military Organization, University of Maryland

Retired Colonel Dr. Gayle Watkins, President of Clove Brook Enterprises.

Time travel is the lovechild of an unlikely couple: H. G. Wells and Albert Einstein. Writer and scientist together inspired generations in the conviction that somehow, somewhere, time travel is possible.

And while it remains the myth of movies in which people drive glowing Deloreans in the 1950’s or right the wrongs of the past. it’s also a topic of earnest research and endless conjecture for the world’s physicists. Could we truly zoom ahead of the clock, or back? If so, what would we find?

Time travel in scientific thought is the realm of wormholes, cosmic strings, twists in space, theories that could lead to revelations about the origins of the universe. It’s a realm in which Einstein’s theories are pushed and prodded and pondered from the smallest particle to the largest black hole.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

J. Richard Gott, professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, author of “Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe”

Kashmir should be an earthly paradise. Instead, the mountainous province is wedged like a bloody jewel between three of the world’s nuclear powers.

Kashmir is controlled by India, but religion aligns most of its population with Pakistan. The tension has caused endless skirmishing in this beautiful battle-weary state. China looks on, leaning now to India’s side, now to Pakistan’s. Late next week, Pakistan’s General Musharaff and India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee will meet in what some say could provide the first sensible communication on Kashmir in decades.

Skeptics assert that little can come of any conversation without intervention. Meanwhile, Kashmiris remain trapped on a religious and ideological battlefield that is somehow their home.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli, director of the South Asia program at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University

Andrew Whitehead, BBC Correspondent, previously based in South Asia

Devesh Kapur, Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University

If you’ve ever seen a baby reach for the moon, literally, reach out and try to grab that big bright ball in the sky, you know that looks can be deceiving when it comes to celestial bodies.

Now people have been gazing at the heavens ever since they learned to bend their necks backwards, but it’s only been in the last five hundred years that we figured out that this world, our home, is not the center of all the stars and planets in the sky. Only in the last century did scientists start thinking of the hundred billion stars in our galaxy as part of an expanding universe.

Now NASA is sending a satellite out beyond our sun to study, of all things, the after-glow of the Big Bang. NASA calls it “the ultimate baby picture” of the universe.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Lyman Page, physicist, Princeton University, NASA Microwave Anisotropy Probe

and Alan Hirshfeld, astronomer and author of “Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos.”

Independence. It’s the American condition.

To the ragtag revolutionaries of 1776 it was a bold slap at the old order. It meant freedom from stuffy ole England and crazy King George, but more importantly, it meant freedom to take a gamble on the wild-eyed notion of self-government. But even at the nation’s birth, independence had its contradictions. Sparkling promise was shadowed by slavery, and by suffrage denied to all but white men of property. Today the idea of independence still holds us in its thrall, but its practice has migrated from the realm of the political to that of the personal.

It’s now more about the cars we drive and lifestyles we choose than the self evident truths staked out in the Declaration; less about freedom to, more about freedom from. We’re declaring and defining independence, that peculiar, profound, perplexing American obsession.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Orlando Patterson, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Jane Kamensky, Associate Professor of History, Brandeis University

and Richard Ford, novelist, author of “Independence Day.”

Imagine a landscape defined by sea and rock, by ice and wind, a people with hands blackened by coal, cut and calloused by fishing line, a place where grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers hover in memory as if they still lived.

This is the Cape Breton Island of writer Alistair MacLeod. For nearly 40 years, MacLeod has carefully chosen his words, putting this place on the page in the long-hand of his youth. He’s not your one-book-a-year novelist; his readers content themselves with painstakingly-rendered short stories and MacLeod’s celebrated 1999 novel, “No Great Mischief.” Apparently, it’s enough for the critics, too. Later today he will take home to Cape Breton one of the richest literary prizes in the world.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Author Alistair MacLeod

Slobodan Milosevic seems as determined to stare down the jurists of the International War Crimes Tribunal as he was to shrug off NATO’s missiles two years ago.

This morning in The Hague, the former leader of Yugoslavia denounced the Court as illegal, and called Western nations the real criminals.

Back in Belgrade, people and politicians are arguing about the cost of the trial. Some say Milosevic was sold down the Danube, traded for the promise of over a billion dollars in reconstruction aid. Others say this extradition will help rebuild less tangible bridges, that it shows Serbs are ready to rejoin the community of nations and put 10 years of war and isolation behind them. Meanwhile Ratko, Radovan and others remain at large.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Jean-Jacques Joris, special political advisor to Prosecutor Carla del Ponte of the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague

Aleksa Djilas, sociologist and historian in Belgrade

and Laura Silber, Senior policy advisor at the Open Society Institute and co-author of “Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation.”

Sex, savagery, and murder inside this enormous tangle of sticks piled high with strange objects, including a half-naked Barbie doll: It’s just another day at the unruly nest of a family of ospreys.

The osprey was nearly driven into extinction by the chemical DDT, but now it’s back in the marshes and along the shorelines across the United States, wheeling in its aerial hunt for fish and thrilling observers with its spectacular dives.

Be careful not to romanticize this raptor, says the writer David Gessner. He spent months observing the ospreys near his Cape Cod home. He only began to see the birds, he says, when he forced himself to live on “osprey time.” What he learned was not just about ospreys, but about himself as well.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

David Gessner, author, “Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder.”

The poet Seamus Heaney wrote three decades ago of his native Northern Ireland, “O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod; of open minds as open as a trap.”

Well, the trap has caught Northern Ireland once again. The Unionist leader David Trimble has resigned his post in the power-sharing government, citing the IRA’s refusal to put its arms “beyond use.” Republicans throw Trimble’s talk of un-kept promises back at Unionists and the British government, calling for police and military reforms. Northern Ireland is a province weary of weapons, of warriors, and sectarian tension, yet once again the passions fueled by decades of conflict threaten to consume the political process.

Marching season approaches, the time for parading Protestant and Catholic stripes, for playing out on the streets what’s not yet resolved in the government.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)

Guests:

Monica McWilliams, leader of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition

Padraig O’Malley, senior fellow at the McCormack Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Boston

and Boston Globe reporter Kevin Cullen.