Imagine this: restaurants with no crying children…Adult-only neighborhoods…A day at the museum with no kids. Sound radical? Relaxing? These are just some of the ideas that a new group is advocating.

They call themselves THINKERS — T-H-I-N-K-E-R – two healthy incomes, no kids, early retirement. They’re tired of being ignored, and discriminated against, and inconvenienced by a society obsessed with children. They’re fed up with parking spaces reserved for pregnant moms, time off work for parents, and unequal expectations at the office.

With baby boomers nearing retirement, and fewer households than ever before having kids, this movement is picking up momentum, and rephrasing old questions about a woman and a man’s right to choose. Will you have that coffee with, or without children?

Guests:

Madelyn Cain, author of “The Childless Revolution”

Dr. David Popenoe, Director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University

Candy Lake, founder of No Kidding in Charlotte, NC.

Think Cairo, World War II. Allied soldiers crowd the bars and the battlefields of North Africa. Well-tailored European tourists loiter in the marbled hotel lobbies. Shimmering on the silver screens is a beautiful singer, a starlet by the name of Asmahan. A Druze princess with eyes so green they shone through the black-and-white, and men fell madly in love.

She challenged the conventions of gender and women adored her for it. Asmahan’s real-life story is as exotic as any movie script. A spy for the British, perhaps for the Turks, and like any good cult figure, she died young in a suspicious auto accident. Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, Mata Hari, now we meet another exotic woman striding across those cultural barriers.

Guests:

Sharifa Zuhur, author, “Asmahan’s Secrets: Woman, War and Song”

Leila Ahmed, Professor of Divinity, Harvard Diviniy School, author, “A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’s Journey.”

Ever since humans first waged war, they’ve tried to invent rules for conducting it. After Rome fell in 410 AD, St. Augustine helped fashion what’s come to be known as “just war theory,” practices and principles which still shape international law governing armed conflict today.

In Iraq, U.S. troops carry small cards into battle listing “rules of engagement,” a soldier has the right to defend him or herself. A soldier can’t target civilians intentionally. But war can be murky and chaotic, and the choices less than clear. For example, What do you do when the enemy hides weapons in a school? Or uses an elderly woman as a shield? What do you do when killing civilians seems the only way to defend yourself? Tough decisions, made in a milli-second, without knowing all the facts. American soldiers as ethical warriors.

Guests:

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Newton

U.S. Army Major Roger Carstens

and Colonel Lyle Cayce.

“Walls! Walls! Give him walls!” A 19th century art critic was so taken with the work of a little-known painter named Paul Gauguin that he appealed to Paris society to make space for the artist’s canvases. “…gentlemen, he said, how posterity will curse you, will rail against you and spit on you, should a sense of Art one day awake in the mind of humanity!”

Humanity has long since awakened to the art of Paul Gauguin. And in a show that has traveled from Paris to Boston, the French painter’s lush renderings of his own Paradise Found get walls like they never did during the painter’s lifetime.

Gauguin Tahiti. The man and his masterpieces.

Guests:

Mario Vargas Llosa, author of “The Way to Paradise”

George Shackleford, chair of the Art of Europe and co-curator of Gauguin Tahiti

Elizabeth Childs, Gauguin scholar and professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis.

Guests:

PLACEHOLDER

In the end, victory came for Kerry in a coast-to coast sweep. Voters from New York to California put their faith in the junior senator from Massachusetts as the man most likely to beat George W. Bush.

But Kerry is not lingering long in the winner’s circle. It’s time he says, to begin thinking about a running mate and to start raising the cash it will take to be a contender. And raise money he must, because just this morning, the GOP is rolling out the first wave in what will be a relentless ad campaign showcasing Bush as a “war president” and touting the tagline, “Steady leadership in times of change.” While this first blitz aims above the belt, you can bet that with more than $100 million in the bank, and a Democratic opponent now firmly in the crosshairs, the Republicans have other plans for the junior senator.

Guests:

Walter Shapiro, USA Today columnist

Rick Davis, former campaign manager for Senator John McCain, 2000 Presidential race

Sara Taylor, deputy strategist for the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign

Eric Rademacher, co-director of the University of Cincinatti’s Ohio Poll.

It’s another bloody day in Iraq. Just as Iraqi leaders are preparing to embrace a constitution guaranteeing freedoms of speech and religion, more than 100 Iraqis are killed at Shiite religious festivals in Karbala and Baghdad. One more American soldier is killed while on patrol.

Some reporters say Iraq is becoming a more dangerous place for Westerners. And yet, that’s where two Boston Globe reporters are heading for a year long assignment. They are a couple. They met while covering the fall of Baghdad. Now they are about to go house hunting in that war-torn city. And although they have to worry about their safety, they are fascinated by the ongoing conflict in that country, and determined to find new ways of covering what has become, for some Americans, an old story.

Guests:

Anne Barnard, Boston Globe reporter

Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe reporter

Shelley Thakral, BBC Bagdad producer.

They are not only the people who fight the oilfield fires, and feed the soldiers, they also the ones who ship in the bullets, they move stuff by plane and locomotive, they’re able to build tall buildings with a single bid.

They are Halliburton, and they have some problems. In recent weeks, the Pentagon and the State Department have started criminal investigations into accusations of overbilling. But a closer look at the largest American contractor in Iraq means going beyond the stories of kickbacks and ties to the vice president. Halliburton is the biggest. They say they are the best, but is this company also becoming the only game in town? Is Halliburton taking American taxpayers for a ride or making an otherwise untenable war possible?

Guests:

Rep. John Dingell, Democratic Congressman from Michigan

Jane Mayer, reporter for The New Yorker

Neil King, reporter for The Wall
Street Journal

Henry Bunting, Halliburton whistle-blower

Randy Karl, president of Kellogg, Brown and Root.

There are few competitive endeavors that require helicopters, canoes, rental cars and bicycles. Few that demand travel from the Alaskan wilderness, to the mosquito-infested swamps of Florida, to the rancid garbage dumps of Texas, all in the hopes of seeing a Bristle-Thighed Curlew or a Tundra Swan.

This is extreme birding. The Super Bowl of birding is The Big Year. People race across the country to spot as many bird species in North America as they humanly can in one year. This sport is not for the faint of heart. True birding diehards have been known to spend 270 days and $60,000 in their attempt to be the top birder. Writer Mark Obmascik chronicled The Big Year and three men who lived it. He calls it a tale of nature, man, and fowl obsession.

Guests:

Mark Obmascik, author of “The Big Year”

Greg Miller, extreme birder.

Aristide is out, forced to flee when the U.S. pulled its support for the Haitian leader. He leaves behind a nation in chaos, a worst-case scenario made real. A modest but growing multi-national force of American, French and Canadian military is in the Caribbean island’s capital city, there to restore order and prevent further violent clashes between anti-government rebels and the exiled president’s most die-hard supporters.

No one is exhaling. Because even if Haiti’s immediate turmoil is quelled, and that remains to be seen, the nation’s future, and the future of democracy there are in doubt.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard is on guard for the anticipated exodus of Haitian refugees seeking safe harbor on American shores. Rebuilding Haiti from within, and without.

Guests:

John Shattuck, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor during the Clinton Administration, and current CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

Robert Fatton, Professor and Chair of the Woodrow Wilson Department of
Politics at the University of Virginia, and Haiti scholar

Charles Baker, a businessman in Haiti and member of the Opposition Group of 184

Kathie Klarreich, a long-time resident of Haiti and reporter and columnist for The Christian Science Monitor and Time magazine.