This is a Special Edition of The Connection.
September 11, 2002. One year since the day when so many died and the course of history was altered. For the next two hours, a chance for us all to reflect on where we are today. We start by listening, back one year ago this hour.

Guests:

Richard Bernstein, New York Times reporter and author of “Out of the Blue”

the Reverend James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City

Marie Howe, poet

Robin Young, correspondent for WBUR

Chuck Mathers, friend of a 9/11 victim.

Islam is a religion of peace. No, it’s a religion of the sword. Devout Muslims lay claim to both declarations, sometimes justifying, sometimes condemning,
often just trying to explain Islam. Over the past year, the conversation has become an urgent debate, as many Americans look for a place to lay the blame for September 11.

Muslims in the U.S. find that their faith now affects their lives in ways few could have imagined a year ago. Nighttime knocks on the door, and authorities demand answers to question that might have seemed racist – before.

Yet still, from abroad and from within the mosques in the country, the fury and hatred toward America can easily be heard. Islam, militancy, religion and ideology.

Guests:

Ebrahim Moosa, associate professor, Islamic Studies, Department of Religion, Duke University

Daniel Pipes, author of “Militant Islam Reaches America”

Ali Asani, professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture, Harvard University

For much of the past year, the dateline has been “Afghanistan.” The bombs. The food drops. The refugees. The casualties. The battles and eventual fall of Kandahar, Kabul, and Kunduz. Then finally, with the fall of the Taliban, the rise of a certain kind of hope.

Suddenly, from a war zone came photos of women’s faces and kites and talk of nation building, reconstruction, and renewal. But the violence has never moved far away.

The recent assassination attempt against Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai renews suspicion about how fragile the country remains. Afghanistan, the United States, and the fight to keep history from repeating itself.

Guests:

Dexter Filkins, Reporter for the New York Times

Ahmed Rashid, correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, The Far Eastern Economic Review
and The Daily Telegraph, and author of “Jihad”

and Lyse Doucet, BBC Correspondent based in Kabul

Rina Amiri, UN political affairs officer, Kabul.

Part of the legacy of the last year is in language. The way words fit in our mouths, in our conversations. Some changes emerge hardened from the restless rumbling between political wordsmiths and journalists, a “War on Terror” launched, an “Axis of Evil’ established. Other rhetoric flails and dies.

When was the last time you talked about “Operation Enduring Freedom?” But, just as what we now call “9-11″ has altered the way we live our lives, so its particular vocabulary has crystallized and channeled the way we understand those events.

George Orwell once wrote that “what is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.” Ground Zero, freedom, patriotism and the war over language.

Guests:

Sandra Silberstein, author of “War on Words: Language, Politics and 9/11″

Jay Keyser, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics.

Everything has changed. Hasn’t it? This week, we begin by taking stock, weighing the events and emotions of the past year, reckoning the loss. Still, we sift the ashes and wonder at, sometimes worry at, signs of new life, the familiar and the startling. And above all, we try to learn the lessons offered. One year ago, death, sickening, enormous, arrived. Then came the heroes, firefighters and others, giving the “full measure of their devotion,” sweating and digging and giving human form to the patriotism that filled so many in this country.

“Welcome to the new normal,” some said, “Irony and innocence are dead,” some said. Seriousness, worldliness, generosity were to be the new national watchwords.

Guests:

Fouad Ajami, Director of Middle East Studies, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies

Geneva Overholser, professor, public affairs reporting, Missouri School of Journalism, Washington bureau

P.J .O’ Rourke, writer for The Atlantic Monthly

He is the first superintendent of an urban school district, and the first African American, to get the big education desk in Washington. Maybe DC just figured out that experience counts, or maybe Rod Paige is just too good to be true.

He grew up in rural Mississippi, his mom was a librarian – his dad a principal. Paige started his career a college coach, later, he was a university professor, and eventually Superintendent of Houston public schools. When he left Texas for Washington, the drop out rate in Houston was down, test scores were up, and the achievement gap between minority and white students had narrowed.

Today, he is trying to bring choice, accountability and excellence to public schools across the country.

Guests:

Rod Paige, US Secretary of Education

Sandra Simpson, Social Studies teacher at Dorchester High School in Boston, MA

We all know the terms: vouchers, standards, charter schools, choice, the stuff of education as practiced by policymakers. But for those on the frontlines of urban schools, teachers and students and parents – many of these terms ring hollow.

Here the fight over education isn’t a policy debate, it’s a streetfight, a daily, knock down, drag out battle with and for children. Children for whom a public school education is their only shot. For these students, whether they know it or not, education is a lifeline. And for too many, that lifeline is stretched, frayed and failing.

Currently 3.5 million children in this country are stuck in failing schools. Though some may transfer out, the vast majority will stay and suffer, or stay and strive.

Guests:

Isaura Mendes, community activist in Dorchester, MA

Sandra Simpson, Social Studies teacher at Dorchester High School in Boston, MA

Pedro Noguera, Judith K. Dimon Professor in Communities and Schools at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

It was bound to happen, the 1960s transformation of electronic sound-generating laboratory tools into music. But don’t look inside a Moog synthesizer to make sense of all those oscillators, ASDR envelopes, low-pass filters and patch-cords.

Listen to the sound; think of the pink and purple zodiac albums, space movies, the evolution of electric rock from Emerson Lake and Palmer to Radiohead and see how synthesized sound has become so ingrained in the music of the past 30 years. It started with tinkering hands of a kid from New York.

Robert Moog had no idea of the changes he was about to unleash when set up a card table at his first audio show. Now his genius and insight continue to inspire tinkering hands of cutting edge nouveau-music nerds.

Guests:

Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Electronic Synthesizer

Keith Emerson, musician and Moog player

Trevor Pinch, co-author “Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer.”

To President Bush, they’re the “axis of evil,” but seen from the Kremlin, they’re more like members of the “best customer club.” North Korea, Iran, and Iraq are among Russia’s favorite business partners even though they’re at the center of the White House’s war on terror.

Just this week, the Iraqi foreign minister met with his Russian counterpart, and received a statement of Moscow’s opposition to an American attack on Baghdad. Iran’s set to get nuclear plants, Pyongyang may get money for railroad construction. You could call the recent high-profile connections a thumb in the eye of U.S. policymakers, a reassertion by President Vladimir Putin of the nation’s superpower sensibilities. It could also be simple economics. Pride and nostalgia.

Guests:

Mark Kramer, director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, and a senior associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University

Dmitri Trenin, the deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center

Scott Peterson, Moscow bureau chief for “The Christian Monitor”

Pavel Podvig, researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy, and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, currently a visiting researcher at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University

Who among us doesn’t yearn for spiritual enlightenment, euphoria, or just an overwhelming sense of peace? “Sasha” Shulgin has made a 30-year career of it. But Shulgin’s search is unique.

He’s the patron saint of psychonauts. A chemist, he searches for compounds, keys to unlock the mind. In the 1960s, he rediscovered then championed the drug MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. And, as the War on Drugs scrambles to squelch American teens’ X appetite, Shulgin works away at his lab, creating, mixing, and sampling, new concoctions.

Together he and his wife Ann are dedicated to a disciplined, if drugged, exploration of the subconscious, and they spread the word of their research in the name of safety, psychology, and spirit. Sasha and Ann Shulgin’s acid test.

Guests:

Alexander and Ann Shulgin, together they create and test chemical compounds with the intention of furthering mental health medicine, and they have co-written two books, “PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story” and “TIHKAL: The Continuation”

Dr. Barry Kosofsky, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Assistant Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital