By host Tom Ashbrook:
High-rolling culture critic Greil Marcus has been mixing it up with America’s heart and soul, music and arts for a long time now. He’s gone deep on Elvis and Herman Melville, on rock and roll and punk rock, on Bob Dylan and the song of hillbillies.
Now, Marcus is looking beyond heart [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Every man is, or wants to be, an idler,” wrote the great Samuel Johnson in 1758. And he surely could have added every woman, too. From Johnson to Jack Kerouac to Ferris Bueller and the great age of Slackers, the appeal of lounging, loafing, goofing off, and vegging out has [...]

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 [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron knows a thing or two about life. And she shares. The story of her break-up as a young mother with Watergate star reporter Carl Bernstein is the thinly-veiled “Heartburn.”
She covered sex and the friendship of men and women in “When Harry Met Sally.” There was “Silkwood” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When the poachers came into Zambia’s Luangwa National Park, they were deadly effective and completely merciless. With their AK-47s and meat racks and tusk carriers to haul ivory off the savanna, they slaughtered 93 percent of the park’s once thriving elephant population.
Then came a UN crackdown on the ivory trade — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Dr. Bill Thomas may change your life, or at least the end of it. Thomas is a rebel and a visionary who doesn’t like the way old people get warehoused in America. He doesn’t like the nursing home layout, the smell, the food, the loneliness, the boredom, the way elders get [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Some men have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. Bill Buford had a midlife crisis and ran into the kitchen. Not just any kitchen, but the wild, flaming, hellish heaven of the kitchen of superstar chef Mario Batali, and into the madness and romance of extreme Italian cooking.
Bill [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When the music rolled each week for “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, it was a truly national American event. Nearly 75 percent of the country’s TV households gathered at the TV screen for Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo — a true mass market.
Today, television’s number-one, top-rated TV show — CSI: [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In Napoleon, North Dakota, the winters are long and cold. The summers are short and hot and, for farm kids, hard. Debra Marquart grew up on a third generation family farm outside Napoleon – steering the tractor from the time she was five, wrestling with boys in the endless wheat [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The world of Christian rock is so big these days that if you’re in it sometimes you can hardly see out, and if you don’t know it, you don’t know a big chunk of this country.
P.O.D., Newsboys, Switchfoot, Jars of Clay — these groups and a pile of others are selling more [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Director Catherine Hardwicke made her name in Hollywood with tough, edgy films about teenagers in trouble. In “Lords of Dogtown,” she tracked the lonely young souls of California’s skateboard culture. In her breakout film “Thirteen,” she gave us the harrowing tale of young teenage girls in a world of trouble with [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
A tough year, and a tough week — even into the heart of the holidays. A brand-spanking new Secretary of Defense, on his way to Iraq, says failure would be a calamity. But the President and Joint Chiefs are reported at odds on what to do next.
Surge or no surge, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The three climbers on the Tilly Jane trailhead on December 8th, beneath Oregon’s towering Mt. Hood, left behind a simple note at the warming hut at the ranger’s station: “We are a party of three attempting North Face,” they wrote. And that was it.
Up they went, to the summit it [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The number one box office draw in America last weekend was Will Smith’s “The Pursuit of Happyness,” with a desperate, down and out father struggling to hit it big, save his family, and go rags-to-riches as stock broker.
For millions of Americans who have known the cold chill of hard times and the [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
Legendary newspaper columnist and humorist Art Buchwald has always been the life of the party. This year, Buchwald’s party trick got serious. He almost died.
In February, with failing kidneys and the doctors saying he had only weeks to live, the 80-year-old wit checked in to a Washington hospice and prepared for [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“We’re not winning, but we’re not losing,” is the new formulation embraced now by President Bush on Iraq. But where does that leave the troops, the American men and women in the field, in the streets, in Iraq, where the frontlines are everywhere and the way home is always a season [...]

By Tom Ashbrook:
“We make a living by what we get,” said Winston Churchill. “We make a life by what we give.” Some give billions these days — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett — and, well, they should for the billions they’ve made. But we’re not all billionaires.
Everyday across the country an informal army of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Donald Vance was a 29-year-old US Navy veteran working in Baghdad when the prison door slammed on him. Blindfolded, shackled, thrown on a concrete slab, and cut off from legal representation by an American system and American guards in an American-run detention center in Iraq. For 97 days.
Vance was not a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Let the reader beware,” warns novelist Thomas Pynchon, before the reader even begins Pynchon’s vast new novel, “Against the Day.”
And then we’re off, on a mad caper that can only be described, of course, as “Pynchonesque.” Starting high above the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 in a plummeting dirigible, then into [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
So, what will it be for US troops in Iraq? To “double down” or draw down? To surge in with more or begin to turn the treads for home? The debate is white hot in Washington now.
Just 12 percent of Americans support sending more troops to Iraq, according to [...]