By host Tom Ashbrook:
We all know the story, delivered in grade school textbooks across the country, of how the universe began. The Big Bang. Fourteen billion years ago. Space and time and everything, exploding into being in a flash, and still exploding as celestial bodies race apart across the cosmos.
Well, maybe so. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Fifty years ago, marriage and divorce rates in America were roughly equal among all classes and races. Not anymore. Not even close. When headlines this month announced divorce rates were down to their lowest point in decades that was true, sort of.
They’re down for the college-educated and affluent. [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
At the end of a too-short and turbulent life, iconic French singer Edith Piaf sang “no regrets” with all her big French heart. She was four feet eight inches tall, with a driving voice that captured the tragedy and longing and beauty of a hard century.
Born on the mean streets of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Way down in the deep blue sea, even at the planet’s frigid poles, there is much more life than you might think. Astonishingly rich biodiversity, say deep-sea mariners just back with the latest research.
Carnivorous sponges. Ultra-deep crustaceans. A red octopus with wings on its head. More biodiversity than the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s been a long and winding road for women in the American workplace. First, they were frozen out or locked in the steno pool. Then came “liberation” with its open doors and glass ceilings. Then, a crisis of confidence over whether work and child-rearing could really co-exist.
Now, the new [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the heart of Baghdad’s Green Zone, US and Iranian diplomats posed for the cameras yesterday. It was the biggest break in nearly three decades in the deep freeze between Washington and Tehran. But what it means is still anybody’s guess.
This month, US warships were war-gaming off the coast of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
They came out of San Angelo, Texas in what seemed like a sweet Texas whirlwind. But the backstory of “Los Lonely Boys” — multi-platinum Grammy winners on the road to superstardom — is not a story of overnight sensation.
It’s a Mexican-American story of dreams and struggle and “Texican pride” — of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You don’t get higher-profile than the celebrity portraits of photographer Annie Leibovitz. From the covers of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair to the Hollywood heights, she has famously photographed Demi Moore nude and very pregnant, John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono, Michael Jordan looking godlike, and Jack Nicholson putting in his [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On Monday, Memorial Day, the rituals of war and remembrance will unfold again — lilacs in the air, gunfire salutes, and praise for dead soldiers.
Loss in war is never easy. But the war that Iraq has become makes it doubly hard. Public support, among Republicans and Democrats, has never been [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Victory in Iraq may be hard to picture, but victory was at hand for George W. Bush in Washington this week, as Democrats folded on their demand for troops withdrawal deadlines and gave the president the money to go on funding the war — until September.
On immigration, there was fury and outrage [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ok. Let’s take our lumps first: as a nation, the headlines and health reports scream at us — we are fat, chubby, tubby, obese, double-wide, love-handled, heavyweight snack-masters. And we don’t like it.
Consumer Reports says 90 million Americans are dieting right now, with an average goal of losing 37 [...]

Guests:
Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor and legal analyst for Slate
David Iglesias, fired US Attorney from New Mexico
Mark Tushnet, law professor at Georgetown University

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Monica Goodling didn’t look like a storm trooper before the House Judiciary Committee. Didn’t speak like one either, in her whispery opening responses.
But the 33-year-old former counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and liason to the White House finally said it straight up yesterday: she “crossed the line” in playing politics [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It was 1967, the Summer of Love, and the Beatles were making cultural revolution. Three years earlier, they were the Fab Four rocking the USA on the Ed Sullivan Show. Three years later, they would be finished, disbanded.
But on June 2, 1967 — forty years ago next week — they released [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For a nation of immigrants, America has always had a complicated relationship with immigration. Some came in splendor, some came in chains, and everything in between.
In the half century since Ellis Island closed, immigration and the immigrant experience have changed massively, again. Do we still want to absorb? Do [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The baby boomers made a lot of babies. And now, they’re all grown up — or nearly — and hitting the American workplace in waves. Twenty-somethings with iPods and attitude, ready to take on the world as they see it.
The early line on Generation Y? Ambitious, demanding, questioning everything, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
You’ve got to hand it to her. Hillary Clinton does not quit. She toughed out the rough end of her husband’s presidency, and dived in herself to become a popular and respected US Senator from New York.
Now, she’s built a campaign like few others in history – with its huge [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Paul Wolfowitz no-fault divorce with the World Bank is behind us, but the epidemic of non-accountability in American government rolls on. From the highest offices in the land, when fiasco erupts lately, we are grudgingly, belatedly told “mistakes were made.” As if by gremlins, maybe, but not “me”!
The ducking and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
First it was pet food in Canada and the US with Chinese ingredients killing thousands of cats and dogs. Then came reports of toothpaste in Panama with Chinese ingredients killing people.
Now, we learn that just last month, food from China bound for the US included dried apples preserved with cancer causing [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Americans get married every day of the year, but right now we are headed into the heart of wedding season and the wedding business — and what a business it is.
White tents and tall cakes are months in the making and budgets head over the moon. Bride and groom dream of [...]