By host Tom Ashbrook:
Maybe every generation has its sexual revolution — for, against, or ambivalent on what is now called “hooking up.”
But one new thing for sure on American college campuses in recent years has been the almost universal emergence of the campus sex columnist. Nearly every college has one now — a student typing [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
All roads lead to Washington this week, except for Andy Fastow’s and Bernie Ebbers — and maybe Mozart’s.
President Bush battled a major brush fire over leaked intelligence saying the Iraq war has poured gas on the flames of international terror. Congress gave the President nearly all he wanted on detainee interrogation [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Daniel Mendelsohn’s grandfather told him stories, in his rich Yiddish accent, about all kinds of things — life in the old country, life in America, stories of rabbis and high holidays and Jewish tradition.
The one thing Mendelsohn’s grandfather never told stories about was his brother Shmiel, Shmiel’s wife and their four beautiful [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
They stood in the Rose Garden. They didn’t shake hands. Then Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf sat down last night for a two and a half hour dinner with George W. Bush. It may have been a long two and a half hours.
Musharraf said this week that Karzai is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Sometime in the next month, a baby will be born, an umbilical cord cut, and the population of the United States will hit 300 million. It’s been a long time coming, since this was a vast continent of tepees and forest trails.
But now, uniquely among the world’s richest nations, America’s population [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
What began as a leak over the weekend has exploded into a full-fledged new chapter in the grinding debate over America’s war in Iraq. Under intense pressure on the home stretch to midterm elections, the President yesterday ordered the release of excerpts of the National Intelligence Estimate’s classified assessment of the [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
America’s come a long way on race and color assumptions in the last fifty years, but you wouldn’t know it from the color of top management at the Fortune 500. In corporate executive suites and even in middle management, the color of money and power is still overwhelmingly white.
But the country’s population [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Arianna Huffington was the tall, skinny Greek kid who talked her way into Cambridge University and then onto the American media stage.
She’s married rich, written up a storm, taken on television, run against Schwarzenegger for governor in California, and along the way made a noisy migration from the political right to the political [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In his eighteen years as Republican senator from Missouri, friends and critics called ordained Episcopal priest and outspoken American politician John Danforth “Saint Jack.” But the sermon this lifelong Republican is preaching these days is winning him no friends in the powerful Christian Right wing of the GOP.
The Christian Right, Danforth [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The excitement off a deep-water rig in the Gulf of Mexico this month brought the old Texas oil-strike jubilation images to mind. Oil! Oil! But in this case, the now-celebrated “Jack 2″ well was pulling oil from miles beneath the ocean surface.
An extraordinary five miles down, the Gulf’s deep-water [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It has been a tough week at the UN. The American President took the podium and did OK. The leaders of Iran and Venezuela took the podium and brought the house down.
Hugo Chavez may have been completely out of line when he called George Bush the devil incarnate — but [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
American actor Sean Penn takes to the big screen this weekend in the new film version of Robert Penn Warren’s earthy classic of wild southern politics, “All The King’s Men.”
It’s the story of a charismatic poor-man’s hero, demagogue, and constitution-busing near-dictator based on the real-life story of Louisiana’s legendary Depression-era governor, senator, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Economist Joseph Stiglitz has won the Nobel Prize, has been chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, chief economist at the World Bank — and made waves everywhere he’s gone.
His 2002 bestseller “Globalization and Its Discontents” captured the apprehension of a world twirling in the churn of a globalizing economy — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Celebrated novelist E. L. Doctorow reminds us that stories were the first repositories of human knowledge, as important to survival as the spear and the hoe. Eons later we are still understanding the world and ourselves through stories.
Doctorow has written plenty, from his blockbuster “Ragtime,” years ago, to his latest, “The [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was right there in my fridge — Earthbound Farm’s Natural Selection spinach — and now it’s gone, like tons of spinach dumped by Americans across the country in the E. coli scare of the last week.
But a shelf full of questions remain about why a hundred-plus spinach-eaters in 21 states have [...]

President Bush addresses the United Nations. We’ll listen in and have expert analysis on the U.N. and U.S foreign policy now.
Guests:
Thomas Biersteker, Professor of Transnational Organizations at The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
Lee Feinstein, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and International Law at the Council on Foreign Relations
Carol Giacomo, Reuters diplomatic [...]

The Pope apologizes for comments he made about Islam but the controversy and fallout continues. We’ll look at the awkward dialogue of two great faiths.
Guests:
Tracy Wilkinson, Rome Bureau Chief for LA Times;
John Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, and author of “What Everyone Needs to Know [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In May 1941, when his towering masterpiece “Citizen Kane” hit the theaters, actor, director, writer, producer Orson Welles was just 25 years old. “Citizen Kane” would be called the best American film ever made. Generations of Americans would intone “Rosebud” as a totem of life’s deep mysteries.
Orson Welles — dazzling young [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The hot debate in Washington and beyond over the treatment of terror suspect detainees is not the one the White House expected — not Republicans versus Democrats over who’s tougher. Instead, it’s been a debate over effectiveness and morality, with key GOP leaders debating each other.
Globally, US forces now hold 14,000 [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Hail, Caesar!” they still cry in the movies as once they saluted in the heart of ancient Rome and on battlefields from Gaul to Syria.
Julius Caesar — general, consul, dictator — is one of the most magnetic and controversial figures in all of history. Few have matched his power, his military [...]