The alphabet of poverty runs through the Bronx of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s reporting, an impenetrable maze of bureaucracy behind the jumble of letters. You want the WIC, it’ll help feed your babies, but fear the BCW, which could take them away. SSI will send you a check, the DEA will send you to prison.

After immersing herself into the day and night struggles of an extended family in the ghetto, LeBlanc emerged eleven years later on intimate terms with what it means to be poor in urban America. Where stoned grandmothers barely care for their teenaged daughters’ too many kids. Where sons follow the trajectories of fathers, who wind up dead, or in prison. It’s fact that reads like fiction. A Random Family you come to know too well.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc will be reading
tonight at the Harvard Bookstore, 6:00 p.m. click on the link for details.

Guests:

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, journalist and author, “Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx”

Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have been considered the ultimate deterrent, the best security against nuclear war. That idea held for 40 years as the U.S and Soviet Union pointed thousands of nukes at each other.

Britain, France, and China joined the club, and in 1970, the Non Proliferation treaty earned pledges from more than 180 other countries promising to stay nuclear free, but the treaty itself is under attack. First it was Israel, then India and Pakistan, now North Korea and Iran are developing their own weapons. Even the United States is testing the limits of non-proliferation, as the Pentagon makes its case for taking nukes out of the bunker, to boost America’s military might. Exploring the politics of proliferation with the Nobel Prize winning Physicist Steven Weinberg.

Guests:

Dr. Steven Weinberg, University of Texas at Austin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979, and fellow at the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

America has always been a praying nation. But rarely have those prayers been so organized. In the last couple of years, millions of people have signed up to pray in virtual prayer groups on the Web. Now an organization called The Presidential Prayer Team is asking people to register on a web site and “adopt” a government official or an overseas soldier, and pray for them.

More than a million have signed up. Intuitively, many people believe in the power of prayer. But this question is also a matter of scientific debate. Recent medical studies have shown that praying for others, intercessory prayer, as it is known, can actually make a difference. Critics say that such research amounts to “squeezing God into a test tube.”

Guests:

Larry Dossey, author, “Healing Words,” and executive editor, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine

Stephen Post, professor and associate director for Educational Programs, Center for Biomedical Ethics, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University

A moment of optimism in the Middle East, or not. After endless negotiations and massive pressure from the US, the EU and Israel, the Palestinians will have a Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas.

Known for his hard line approach towards Hamas, and respected in Israel, Abbas might be a bridge to peace. Officially he’ll be in charge of only internal affairs, but some say that might change. Others, more skeptical, claim that while Chairman Arafat finally gave into pressure to create this new position, he has no intention of sharing his power.

The Palestinian militants in Hamas insist that Abbas, like Arafat, will not be able to tell them what to do. Considering the appointment of Mahmoud Abbas, and the chances for a breakthrough in the Middle East.

Guests:

James Bennet, Middle East correspondent, The New York Times

Amir Oren, senior military analyst, Haaretz, Ghassan al-Khatib, Palestinian Labor Minister

Ghassan al-Khatib, the Minister of Labor in the Palestinian cabinet.

Dr. Bernard Kouchner’s expertise is not found in any medical text. He calls himself a “specialist in the collapse of society.” He’s spent a career working in places like Biafra and Kosovo, trying to repair the wounds of war, as well as the political upheavals and the human rights violations.

Bernard Kouchner co-founded Medecins sans Frontieres, the French humanitarian organization honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. His main prescription is: Always listen to the voices of the suffering, and not to the rhetoric of the politicians. He says that even though he is also a politician, a former French minister of health. Right now he insists the voices that need to be heard belong to the people in Iraq. War and medicine. The controversial remedy of intervention.

Guests:

Dr. Bernard Kouchner, former Head of the U.N. Interim Administrative Mission in Kosovo, former French Minister of Health and founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Despite some Pakistani claims to the contrary, the search for Osama bin Laden has intensified. The recent arrest of Al Qaeda’s number three man, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has renewed hope that not all trails in the war on terror have grown cold.

U.S. special forces soldiers are reported to be searching the remote northeast and southwest corners of Afghanistan. This past weekend, seven more suspected Al Qaeda operatives were apprehended in Afghanistan and it was reported, then denied, that two of bin Laden’s sons might have been among them.

Osama bin Laden himself slipped off the intelligence radar after the American-led assault on the Tora Bora cave region 15 months ago. Back on the trail of America’s most wanted. The search for Osama bin Laden.

Guests:

Paul Wilkinson, Director and Chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland

Scott Baldauf, Christian Science Monitor Reporter in Pakistan

Shakir Hussain, independent Reporter for The Dawn and The Friday Times, based in Karachi, Pakistan.

Guests:

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University

Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Somewhere along the way, some wise person in your life, probably your mother, told you that money doesn’t buy happiness. And you believed her. Now researchers say that isn’t exactly true; money can in fact buy happiness, sort of.

Three decades of research in the field of “Happiness Economics” says there is a point when enough is enough, and too much makes you miserable. By definition the richest society in the history of the world, Americans spend more dollars on trash bags every year than 90 other countries spend on everything. Yet while our lives are packed with more and more “stuff,” the divorce rate has doubled, the teen suicide rate has tripled, and depression continues to soar. The paradox of purchase power.

Guests:

Polly LaBarre, Senior Editor of Fast Company, and author of the March 2003 article ‘How To Lead a Rich Life”

Professor Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick (UK).

Tapped phones and emails. Secret surveillance. Insistent cajoling and front-page versions of “Let’s Make a Deal.” The diplomacy that used to be conducted in whispers behind closed doors seems lately to be getting louder, and going public, as the United States sizes up its support on the UN Security Council, and tries to cobble together “a coalition of the willing” for a war against Iraq.

While bugging your enemy may be nothing new, bugging your friends and would-be allies has some crying foul. It’s no way to win friends and influence people, they say. And it’s going overboard. Others counter: all’s fair in the run-up to war, and if it works, do it. Threats, bribes and pointed persuasion: Diplomacy’s dark side in the spotlight.

Guests:

Melinda Kimball, Senior Vice President for Programs at the United Nations Foundation

Ambassador Richard Murphy, Senior Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations

Ed Vulliamy, UN Correspondent for The Observer.

Fifty years ago this week, Russians woke up to reports that their leader, Josef Stalin, had died. For most Russians, it was tragic news. For more than 30 years, they had participated in the myth of the man that Stalin had written: the glorious father figure who called himself “Papa Joe,” the man who had fashioned the Soviet Union into what they thought it should be, an orderly, peaceful nation where everyone had a job.

Russians reveled in the idea of their country as the world’s other superpower and Stalin as the hero who had conquered Hitler. Yet even now, with historians acknowledging that Stalin caused as many as 60 million deaths, some Russians long for a return to “derzhavnost” — the mentality of life in a great fatherland.

Guests:

Mark Kramer, Director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and a Senior Associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University

Yevgenia Albats, an independent Political Analyst and Columnist for the Moscow Times and Novaya Gazeta;David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker