Flying dragons, magic swords and evil kings. For thousands of years these have been the makings of great stories and a fascination for youngsters and adults alike. Eragon is one of the latest fantasy books to land on the best sellers list. It’s outranking some of the Harry Potter books. Christopher Paolini wrote the book when he was just 15.

Eragon tells the story of a young boy who finds a magical stone, and when the stone hatches a dragon, the pair soon finds themselves tangled in a war of dwarves and elves and a murderous king. It’s a tale of good versus evil, but five years and over 750 thousand copies later, it’s also a story of how fantasy fiction is topping the bookshelves of readers young and old. The magic of Eragon AND the story of Christopher Paolini.

Guests:

Christopher Paolini, author of “Eragon.”

There was a time when a teacher’s best disciplinary tool was merely the threat to keep a student after school, or to banish a kid to the principal’s office. But today disciplinary tone is set the moment a student steps into school, often through a metal detector, sometimes under the careful watch of an armed guard.

More and more students are subject to strict “zero-tolerance” policies, where even the hint of violence is met with a swift, severe reprisal, such as expulsion or arrest. Juvenile court is starting to replace the authority once held by school officials. Critics say such policies are counterproductive..that kids need closer contact with teachers, smaller classes, smaller schools, and not handcuffs.

Guests:

Richard Arum, author of “Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority”

David Gordon, Superintendent of The Elk Grove Unified School District in Sacramento County, California.

Guests:

Ed Roberts, Professor of Management of Technology at MIT’s Sloan School, Founder and Chairman of the MIT Entrepeneurship Center, and co founder of Zero Stage Capital, in Boston, MA

Amy Salzhauer, General Partner and Founder of Ignition Ventures, based in Cambridge Mass and New York City.

By many measures America’s economy is in pretty good shape. The stock market looks healthy and high tech as measured by the NASDAQ index ooks even better. So why aren’t you turning first to the business pages, and planning your next investment as so many people did in the late 90’s?

Ordinary investors are staying away from the markets, but now along comes Google, the world’s most popular internet search engine and its talk of a initial public offering of shares an IPO. All of a sudden there’s a bit of buzz again, talk about buying into what could, overnight, become a $15 billion dollar company. Experts wonder if this means a return of the tech boom, and a reconciliation between the wizards of high tech, and the average investors high hopes.

Guests:

Ed Roberts, Professor of Management of Technology at MIT’s Sloan School, Founder and Chairman of the MIT Entrepeneurship Center, and co-founder of Zero Stage Capital, in Boston, MA

Amy Salzhauer, General Partner and Founder of Ignition Ventures, based in Cambridge, MA and New York City.

In the 1940s, if you were an illegal immigrant picking oranges in California or apples in New England, you might have called yourself one of “los libres,” the free ones. Sure, you had no legal rights; but you also weren’t beholden to a boss employing you under a guest-worker program, controlling your ability to remain in America.

Today, between 8 and 14 million illegal immigrants live in the U.S. as “los libres,” fearing deportation daily. Yesterday, President Bush announced his plan intended to help those people: a temporary guest worker program that would give foreign workers the legal right to live here. Conservative critics call it amnesty; advocates say the plan panders to employers seeking cheap labor. Some welcome it as a humanitarian step forward.

Guests:

Siobhan Gorman, staff writer for The National Journal,
covering justice and homeland security

Michelle Waslin, senior immigration policy analyst, National Council
of La Raza, a Latino advocacy organization

Reverend Robin Hoover, founder of Humane Borders, a Tucson-based volunteer organization that provides humanitarian assistance to people crossing the Mexico-U.S. border.

What literature class could be complete without a memoir of male adolescence: Tobias Wolff attracted national attention with his own “This Boy’s Life.” His new book, “Old School,” is a novel, but in many ways it is a continuation of his personal chronicle.

In this story, a New England prep school exists as the perfect environment for an aspiring young writer. A place where authors outrank all other heroes, and students compete for the attention of visiting literary icons. Wolff’s young narrator wants so much to be a writer that he types out the stories of Ernest Hemingway just to feel what it was like to have composed them. But his mimicry doesn’t stop there. Our story-teller steals another student’s work and submits it to a writing competition as his own. Fact, fiction and the telling of tales.

Guests:

Tobias Wolff, author

Good fences, said Robert Frost, make good neighbors. Ten years ago the North American Free Trade Agreement knocked down trade fences both north and south.

Back then the fear in this country was that American manufacturing jobs would disappear in Mexico, and that U.S. wages would drop as American workers were forced to compete with foreign labor. Others promised that NAFTA would integrate North American markets and economic benefits would sweep the continent.

But a decade later NAFTA’s impact remains remarkably difficult to measure. Analysts say that relatively few jobs have been created…and lost. And in some sectors American wages have gone up, and Mexican’s down.

Guests:

John Coatsworth, Director of David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University

Joseph Stiglitz, Economics Professor at Columbia University

and Antonio Madero CEO of the San Luis Corporation

It may be the simplest and deepest of human desires, the longing for immortality. For hundreds of years, explorers, scientists, and mad inventors have sought a magic pill that would extend life beyond its normal limits. Until now, the elixirs claiming to provide eternal youth have been, well, so much malarkey.

But today, in labs across the country, scientists are discovering ways to extend life, at least for yeast cells, worms, and mice, and many are promising that human beings will be next. Pharmaceutical companies are investing millions of dollars to develop a pill which could extend healthy human life spans by a quarter century or more. A potential boom in centenarians would change society and the way we view our own lives.

Guests:

David Sinclair, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School;
Leon Kass, chairman, President’s Council on Bioethics and author,”The Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics”

Libyan strongman Moammar Qaddafi has a long history of sponsoring terrorism. But now the bad boy of the Middle East appears to want to make good. Libya has accepted responsibility for bombing the Pan Am Flight over Lockerbie Scotland, and now Qaddafi says he’s renouncing his plans to build nuclear weapons.

In exchange, Qaddafi wants the U.S. to lift economic sanctions against his country, and while the Bush Administration is currently saying it’s not ready to go that far, the President has hailed Libya’s change of heart and promised, to recognize Libya’s progress. Some are welcoming this shift from forceful regime change to diplomatic rehabilitation, but others are warning that dictators never change their stripes.

Guests:

David Mack, Vice President, The Middle East Institute

Mansour El-Kikhia, Libyan dissident and associate professor of political science, University of Texas-San Antonio

Scott Anderson, writer for the New York Times Magazine

Guests:

PLACEHOLDER