Every family and every mother knows about it. The push-pull tensions around work and home life just don’t go away — and especially for women.
Last week, a page one New York Times article hit the stands, saying many female students at the elite Yale University plan to shelve their careers and “happily play a traditional [...]

In his fabled State of the Union Address in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson set the wheels of government to war on poverty in America. In 1988, President Reagan famously responded that poverty had won that war, and hailed a free market strategy as the solution.
Many Americans simply looked away. Hurricane Katrina made looking away impossible. [...]

Maybe it’s just a bad case of second term blues, or maybe the deadly storm of Katrina, Majority Leader Tom Delay’s indictment, and the war in Iraq, but Republicans in congress are looking like a headless turkey.
This week, Majority Leader Delay resigned his post after being indicted by a Texas grand jury on conspiracy charges. [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Comedian Brad Stine was nine-years-old when he became a born-again Christian. He was almost forty when his comedy career had its “come to Jesus” moment.
After years in the mainstream business, doing magic routines and “nose floss” jokes, Stine’s career was floundering. After a club gig, he sat with a lesbian comic [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
A grand jury indictment in Travis County, Texas is shaking Washington and the American political world today. For years now, Texas Congressman and GOP strongman Tom DeLay has been THE muscle behind the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill.
If President Bush was the public face, DeLay was – famously – the “hammer” [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Republican Christopher Shays went right at ex-FEMA chief Michael Brown yesterday on Capitol Hill, calling his testimony on the Katrina disaster “clueless,” “feeble,” “shocking” and “beyond belief.” But the blistering critique of Bush administration appointees that has broken out since the hurricane hit has raced far beyond the halls of FEMA.
The charge [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
A superpower takes a lot of things to war. It takes tanks and planes and missiles and soldiers. It also takes – or tries to – its own reality: to believe, to impose.
But the battlefield has a reality, too. America came to Iraq with a vision of what was [...]

Salman Rushdie has been an international figure for a quarter of a century now, since the 1981 publication of his acclaimed “Midnight’s Children.” He’s been a fixture on bookshelves, on Op-Ed pages around the world, and on podiums speaking up, essentially, for freedom.
Rushdie became a household name in 1989 when Iran’s Ayotollah Khomeini issued a [...]

The Catholic Church continues to struggle with the fallout of its staggering sexual abuse scandal. Just yesterday, the Chicago Archdiocese announced it removed 11 priests suspected of sexual misconduct with minors.
Now, under the new leadership of Pope Benedict the 16th, the Vatican is forging a new path, taking a hard look at whether it should [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
Young English writer Zadie Smith roared out of Cambridge with her first novel “White Teeth” already in her pocket, and knocked the literary and publishing worlds on their ear with her debut bestseller.
With a voice all her own, sassy, smart as a whip and thrillingly vivid, she painted a world where the [...]

Around the world and in Washington, thousands gathered this weekend to protest the war in Iraq. There were also demonstrations in support of the war effort.
Two key figures from the Vietnam era provide perspective on the impact of this war on the homefront.
Guests:
James Webb, Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, and a Marine [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
In the end, Rita was merciful — but it hardly mattered. The mere threat of another super-storm coming ashore less than a month after Katrina, had millions of Gulf Coast residents on the move — fleeing homes, running out of gas, burning alive.
The machinery of rescue was cranked up, oil rigs and [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Americans have a love-hate affair with television news. They turn it off for being sensationalist McNews McNuggets. They turn it on when disaster strikes. They turn its big figures into big celebrities.
For thirty years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell has moved deeper and deeper into the heart of the TV news [...]

With Hurricane Rita churning through the Gulf Coast, more than a million residents from Texas and Louisiana have been evacuating. For many, this is the second time that they will have been displaced since Hurricane Katrina hit.
Writer Maggie Heyn Richardson has been reflecting on the plight of the thousands of displaced Louisianians, as they [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Economist R. Glenn Hubbard has thrown a long shadow in the White House of George W. Bush and its economic policy. As chairman of the President’s council of economic advisers, he was deep in the tax- cutting fray of the first Bush term, lending his gold- plated academic credentials to the Bush [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
For a hundred and fifty years — from the days of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau to the soul-tripping of the ’60s and ’70s — America was a rich, proud hotbed of spiritual seeking.
Within mainstream Christian churches and outside them, the pursuit of spirituality beyond strict religious boundaries was as American as apple [...]

“Everything is Illuminated,” the movie based on the critically acclaimed and bestselling novel of the same name by American wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer, is in theaters now.
Foer first joined us at On Point back when “Everything is Illuminated” swept the nation in 2002.
In an archive radio diary, we bring you an excerpt of Tom Ashbrook’s [...]

By Host Tom Ashbrook:
For almost a month now, the roar of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico has drowned out the roar of battle in Iraq. But the battle noise “over there”, on the other Gulf and into Iraqi towns and desert, has been terrible.
U.S. troops have gone on a raging offensive. Insurgents [...]

If there was a category six, Rita would be there,” said one meteorolgist tracking the monster storm. Packing 170-plus mile an hour winds, and with Galveston in her sights, Rita is predicted to make landfall on Saturday.
More than a million residents of Texas and Louisiana have already evacuated. Oil companies have shut down refineries, including [...]

Garry Wills, the eminent historian and critic, takes a wide view of history. He has applied his sharp pen to the founding of the American Republic, the contradictions within the Catholic Church, John Wayne and the politics of Celebrity.
In a new book, Wills has turned his attention to the great autobiographer and 19th-century historian Henry [...]