By host Tom Ashbrook:
No less than Mark Twain looked at the long end of America’s 19th century, with its railroad barons and opulent rich, and dubbed it the “Gilded Age” — Rockefeller, Carnegie, glittering mansions, vast fortunes, corrupt politics.
With today’s billion-dollar paydays and spiraling concentration of wealth, many see a new Gilded Age around us.
On [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Former CIA director George Tenet’s big new memoir is officially out today, and the country’s top spy chief in the run-up to 9/11 and the Iraq War is hopping mad.
He’s angry that George Bush’s inner circle made him the fall guy for Iraq, taking his phrase “slam dunk” and making him look, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Once there was slow talk and silence. Then came letters – delivered by horse or sailing ship, months in coming, deep in thought. Then came the telegraph, telephone, cell-phone, e-mail, Palm Pilot, Blackberry, texting, instant messaging, and now — Twitter.
Non-stop, instant communication from anywhere, all the time. Hyper-connectivity, always [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
All kinds of lines were laid down this week. In Washington, a veto looms after the House and Senate pass Iraq war funding with pullout dates attached. The White House charges “defeatism.” Nancy Pelosi says no blank check for endless war.
In South Carolina, the Democrats debate, trying to hold [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Twenty-five years ago, super ghost-writer William Novak and his pal Moshe Waldoks banged out the first edition of their Big Book of Jewish Humor. Three hundred wide pages of wit and comedy stretching from the Borscht Belt to Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and Neil Simon.
Now they’re back, with a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
So, April 15th or 16th this year is behind us, the taxes are paid, and the pain of writing that check is starting to recede. And boom, here comes a new warning that we haven’t seen anything yet.
New estimates of the ocean of red ink facing the federal government in the coming [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Twenty years ago, super-novelist Tom Wolfe gave America “masters of the universe” and a new vocabulary for the lifestyles of the big-money rich in his bestselling “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
Now, Tom Wolfe is back, wickedly skewering the super-rich of a new century — the billion-dollar boys of the mega-money hedge fund world. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
New York City, the Big Apple, is going green.
In a green vision extravaganza on Earth Day in New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out a blindingly ambitious 25-year plan to turn New York into America’s urban green giant by 2030.
A million new trees, green rooftops, new parks, an eight dollar a day [...]

Harsh words and accusations came yesterday from the family of slain Army Ranger Pat Tillman on Capitol Hill.
Former Army Ranger Kevin Tillman, who enlisted in the Army along with his pro-football brother Pat, said the Bush administration and Pentagon told the family “deliberate and calculated lies” about how his brother died in 2004.
Dan Ephron has [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and writer David Halberstam was an icon of American journalism. He died yesterday in a car crash in California. He was 73.
In the early years of the Vietnam War, Halberstam infuriated President John F. Kennedy with his tough, critical reporting of the realities of Vietnam — realities that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There are two unshakable images of Russia’s Boris Yeltsin. One is that of the courageous leader standing atop a tank in 1991, staring down the last dangerous gasp of Communist power in a crumbling Soviet Union he would then dismantle.
Another, eight years later, is of a weary Boris Yeltsin wiping away [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” said the Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung-hui, in the video sent to NBC. A hundred billion chances. But did Virginia Tech really have the latitude to intervene with the troubled young man who wrote “must kill, must kill” [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s a new Supreme Court since John Roberts and Sam Alito came onboard, and last week saw the proof in the pudding. The high court’s 5-4 decision on a closely-watched abortion case essentially reversed a similar case of seven years ago, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote on [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Antidepressants are a multibillion dollar business in America and around the world. And therein, says psychotherapist Gary Greenberg, lies a big problem.
Pharmaceutical companies and researchers are casting their nets too wide to find new patients, calling normal, rational feelings a disease, says Greenberg. Some simple sadness, the occasional melancholy, [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
The nation is still reeling from the Virginia Tech massacre, the deadliest shooting incident in its history. Meanwhile, a new, more conservative Supreme Court makes a historic decision to uphold a federal ban on one type of abortion.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fights for his job during a rough-and-tumble Senate hearing. And [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It is springtime here in the city of New Orleans again – the second spring now since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina poured through this city in August of 2005.
The nineteen months since Katrina have been a massive challenge to the engineers who have struggled to drain and dry and defend and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
We are broadcasting from New Orleans this hour. We’re digging into the precarious state of this historic city, a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina and its devastation.
The city center and fabled French Quarter are cleaned up, and wide open for business. But turn any corner in New Orleans, and you [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
For most of us, Italy is associated with cappuccino, fine leather and great art. But among all the culture, it turns out, is a hotbed of international espionage. It’s where forged documents that led to the Iraq War were cooked up and where secret abductions have been carried out.
Italian investigative reporter [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Retired four-star Marine General and former CENTCOM Commander Anthony Zinni believes his country is standing at many crossroads: the next president is somewhere out there in the crowd of smiling politicians.
The road out of Iraq is still unmapped. Iran is just one of the big new challenges for us to [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson:
Millions of Americans are living with cancer, and some very publicly. Elizabeth Edwards, Tony Snow, and Fred Thompson — who thought they had won their battles with the disease — are coping with reoccurrences.
These latest high-profile cases show how American attitudes toward cancer have changed, from something that could only [...]