Madeleine Peyroux’s new album “Careless Love” is like a musical marriage. The songs bring together some things old, some things new, some things borrowed, and all things blue. The blueness is what the critics are talking about.

Hearing her for the first time, with her lovely, lilting, slightly behind the beat pacing, you can’t help but think you’re being haunted by the late great Billie Holiday. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Peryroux considers Holiday her emotional and musical inspiration.

But Peyroux goes beyond traditional jazzy fare to include songs by Hank Williams, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The selections are informed by different times and different styles, but somehow under Peyroux’s musical spell, they’re transformed into a familiar whole.

Guests:

Singer Madeleine Peyroux. Her new CD is “Careless Love.”

The Dutch have followed the French ‘non’ and voted ‘nay’ on the European Union constitution. But its clear voters across Europe have been voting on much more than a treaty.

In these two referenda, they have given a thumbs down to some of the fundamental principles behind the EU — ideals of free trade and ethnic integration. And though it’s not on the ballot, immigration is much on the minds of European voters. The EU’s inclusive rhetoric has clashed with the reality that many Europeans aren’t comfortable with the melting pot’s ethnic stew.

The EU recently expanded to 25 countries, welcoming a group from the former Eastern bloc– and Turkey might be next. All this has unleashed a wave of fear about job losses and about growing numbers of Muslims moving into traditionally Christian countries.

Guests:

Jocelyne Cesari, Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies and Divinity School

George Parker, Bureau Chief for the Financial Times in Brussels

Jim Schilder, an editor with the Dutch magazine HP/ De Tijd.

You wouldn’t think it from watching the news, but across the globe, war is on the decline.

Some five years ago researchers at the University of Maryland started studying global conflict, assuming they would find an increase in fighting. Instead, to their surprise, they found just the opposite. It turns out, that the years of the Cold War brought violence to many countries around the world. But for the past 15 years, peace has been breaking out all over.

The writer Gregg Easterbrook says the reason that such an idea seems counterintuitive in the wake of 9/11 and is found in the daily reports of fighting from Iraq. People read more, and see more pictures of violent conflict and so they think that conflict is getting worse when in fact it is getting better.

Guests:

Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor for The New Republic and visting fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Deep Throat, the anonymous source who helped two reporters bring down a president, has been revealed. Yesterday the Washington Post confirmed that Mark Felt, a man who held the number two position at the FBI was the man who helped Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward pull together the threads of Watergate and follow that scandal all the way to the White House.

From the shadowy parking garages where many of the meetings took place and the whispery voice dramatized in the film “All the President’s Men,” Deep Throat became the most celebrated anonymous source in history.

Today, as the use of such information is once again being debated by journalists and politicians, we look back at the secret that changed the course of American history and we look at its effects today on politics and journalism. Watergate’s long-awaited season finale – Deep Throat unmasked.

Guests:

Daniel Schorr, NPR’s senior news analyst, Geneva Overholser, former ombudsman at the Washington Post and now chair of Public Affairs Reporting at the Missouri School of Journalism

Daniel Okrent, former ombudsman at the New York Times

Charles Colson, Special Counsel to the White House during the Nixon Administration who spent seven months in prison for his role in Watergate

and David Gergen, former Nixon aide now director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.