“The Joy of Sex” was perhaps the most peeked at, giggled at, and studied by bedroom candlelight masterpiece of the seventies.

Published in 1972 “the Joy of Sex” was a quiet sensation, an accepted piece of coffee table scandal in some circles and a liberation manifesto in others. The simple white softcover sex manual and its hirsute heroes were born of one couple’s erotic exploration, and the simple idea that bedroom fun could spread from the fringes of society to every suburban bedroom.

British medical doctor Alex Comfort was encouraged by the success of his rough draft in the small circle of friends, and since that initial publication through 8 million copies and 20 languages. Now 30 years later, Alex Comfort’s son is reissuing the book with some major changes. “The Joy of Sex,” Come again?

Guests:

Nicholas Comfort, consultant for the new edition of ” The Joy of Sex”

Constance Penley, Professor of film studies at the University of California

Jack Murnighan, author of the “Naughty Bits”.

You could call it a Mao Makeover. China’s 16th Communist Party congress has unveiled its new leaders, Goodbye Jiang Zemin, Welcome Hu Jintao. However, there’s a familiar problem: How can this nation of over a billion people, blood-sworn to egalitarian ideals and “the working class as the only class” harness the power of money?

More and more, America and the rest of the world embrace China as an economic partner. The new Central Committee plans to carry Jiang’s policy forward, incorporating (some would say co-opting) entrepreneurs and the middle class. But whether the revolution is entering a new phase or simply giving up the ghost is a good question.

Communism, capitalism and that uncertain space in between.

Guests:

Rob Gifford, NPR reporter based in Beijing

Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Boston University, and author of a number of books including “China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition.”

Mexican writers have long felt trapped on the outside. In 1950, Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz wrote, “We have been expelled from the center of the world and are condemned to search for it through jungles and deserts or in the underground mazes of the labyrinth.” The path blazed by Paz was soon paved, lined, set with streetlights by novelists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.

Now a new group of writers, the ‘Crack’ movement, says that road has fallen into disrepair, that impostors made “magical realism” milk chocolate in a bittersweet world, and painted Mexico as a pastoral village forever floating in a bodice-ripping past.

No more. Authors like Ignacio Padilla are rewriting the Mexican novel.

Guests:

Ignacio Padilla, author of “Shadow Without a Name”

Carlos Fuentes, author of numerous novels, former diplomat.

More and more, along with apple juice and graham crackers at snacktime, toddlers are popping pills. The little tablets are a kid-sized dose of the behavior-altering drug Ritalin.

It’s meant to help children as young as three years old to “focus,” to “get along,” and to “calm down.” Doctors prescribe it to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a condition some researchers dispute even exists.

Nevertheless, a report in the Journal of the AMA finds that already, one per cent of preschoolers in the United States are on some form of “psychotropic” drug, and the federal government is conducting a controversial study on the safety and effectiveness of using Ritalin to treat ADHD in young children. Biology, brain chemistry, and the nature of behavior.

Guests:

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, medicine and health policy reporter, The New York Times;Dr. Lawrence Diller, behavioral pediatrician

Dr. Timothy Wilens, psychopharmacologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital

Guests:

Adam Fuss (An exhibit of his work is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through January 12, 2003).

Adam Fuss took his first photo at age four. A young woman feeding ducks and a small bird, angel-like, flying toward her hand at the exact moment of the “click”.

The image seems prescient. How did he do that? And now, years later, looking at Fuss’ arresting body of work, the question is still relevant. How does he do this? Sunflowers, spirals, and slithering snakes, viscera, bunnies, and floating babies. Black, white, and colorful glory, a striking mix of science and the metaphysical.

But what really marks Fuss’ images? There’s no camera. This modern day artist uses an antiquarian, 19th century technique, carefully thought out photograms. Fuss says he is “always going after something that is perfect and compellingly beautiful.”

Adam Fuss will be speaking at 7 p.m. this evening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. An exhibition of his work entitled Adam Fuss is currently on view in the MFA’s Foster and Rabb galleries through January 12, 2003.

Guests:

Adam Fuss (An exhibit of his work is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through January 12, 2003).

Kanan Makiya has been trained to design things; buildings and towers. Now he wants to design a nation. In the 1960s, the self-proclaimed Trotskyite left Iraq to study architecture in the U.S. Today, a different kind of dissident, he’s helping the White House draft plans to turn Iraq into a democracy.

His supporters call him Iraq’s Solzhenitsyn for his work in exposing Saddam Hussein’s brutality, while critics say he’s crazy to trust the U.S. government’s good will. But Makiya says that the removal of Hussein would present an opportunity to reshape the Middle East unseen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. What’s more, he says, the Iraqi people are ready to hear the U.S. bombers’ roar.

Guests:

Kanan Makiya, professor of Middle East Studies at Brandeis and director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University.

Step on up to the Blarney Stone, and prepare to hear the tale of a small island nation where the people are poor, but happy; politically oppressed, but morally superior; unschooled but blessed with a gift of the gab that makes them the envy of the world.

It’s a land where green begets green, where memory, history, and fiction are woven into the same yarn. And that’s just the yarn historian Roy Foster aims to cut. He’s a revisionist who’s reviled for his views on the Great Potato Famine, an Irishman who’s not afraid to say he likes the English.

He argues Irish history needs to grow up and out of its mythology, and embrace a more complicated, less complacent version of itself. Roy Foster on telling tales and making history in Ireland.

Guests:

Roy Foster, author, “The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland”

That line of people outside the tent? Over there with the fortunetellers and the astrologers? Those are Democrats, desperately trying to divine what went wrong last week, and what comes next. Even their supporters say the party’s recent election platform suffered from near “comic levels of incoherence.”

Later this week on Capitol Hill, the party will tap into its liberal roots, and cast its vote for “San Francisco Democrat” Nancy Pelosi to lead them in the House.

Many inside the party are less than enthused about a lurch to the left. Outside, Republicans are loving the choice of a liberal. Treating Nancy Pelosi’s name like a “kick me” sign taped to the dispirited and disappearing back end of the party.

Guests:

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation

Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council

Lynn Woolsey, Democratic Congresswoman from California.

You can’t just read a little Michael Ondaatje.

Start a sentence, and you’re swept for pages through a grisly Sri Lankan jungle war in Anil’s Ghost or the dusty remains of battle in The English Patient.

The reading is so smooth, you might imagine the writing was effortless. Hah! Michael Ondaatje spends years writing a novel, and more years re-writing it. He says he’s obsessed with editing.

When The English Patient was turned into the movie that won nine Oscars, Michael Ondaatje says he finally met a man even more obsessed than he: the film editor Walter Murch.

This is the man who crafted the Godfather movies and cut both versions of Apocalypse Now — working and reworking dialogue, images, sounds, silence, and time.

The writer Michael Ondaatje discusses the art of editing.

(Michael Ondaatje is speaking at the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, on November 11, 2002, 6 p.m.)

Guests:

Michael Ondaatje, author, “The English Patient”, “Anil’s Ghost”, “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.”