By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was a time when rock stars ruled American culture. It was after Sinatra and before Beyonce, after wooden radios and before iPods.
It was a time when rock stars were bigger than their music, and when popular music drove the culture — Elvis, James Brown, The Beatles, The Stones, Aretha Franklin, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Some weeks the news is hot and flashy and soon gone. Other weeks — the rarer kind — big things happen that we are going to live with for a long, long time. This week was one of those.
In Congress, there was failure to act on an immigration challenge that [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the new view of the Palestinian crisis bubbling out of quarters in Washington:
Hamas took Gaza by the gun. So let them have it. And pour resources into the West Bank, where more moderate Palestinians around Mahmoud Abbas remain in charge. Let the West Bank bloom. Let Gaza whither. And then [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In a handful of weeks, we’ve seen the biggest immigration reform package in decades — the so-called “grand compromise” over who will be American — live and die and live again in the US Senate.
Today, the bill’s fate once again hangs in the balance. It was brought back from the dead [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Some of the world’s most beautiful and exciting animal species are also its most targeted and endangered — and prosperity is only driving the trend.
Centuries ago, to bring a shark’s fin to the emperor for soup was an exotic feat of daring, and a rare dish. Today, sharks are being fin-scalped [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the hands of Korean-American immigrant novelist Min Jin Lee, the immigration debate now on Capitol Hill looks like kid’s stuff.
Her debut novel, “Free Food For Millionaires,” goes much, much deeper in the immigrant experience than talk of fences and borders can reach: to sex and dreams, and money, to status and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“Family Jewels” is, of course, a funny thing to call them. The secret memos released yesterday by the CIA recount a history of law-breaking and dark arts at the agency — the drugging and bugging of Americans, mob deals, assassination plots, poison pills.
People who first talked about this stuff paid dearly. One [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Bill Geist grew up deep in the Midwest, went to work in New York, then turned his eye back on the nooks and crannies and marvels of the American back road.
For twenty years now, he’s trolled the country’s narrowest highways and byways for CBS, for great tales of small town America.
And he’s [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The Supreme Court has spoken. “Bong hits for Jesus” is out as protected speech by high schools students. So much for the kids in Alaska and their cheeky banner.
Big money campaign ads, however, are back in. By a 5-4 vote, the high court said big corporations, unions, anybody with a [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Deep in the Moscow subway, Russians moving beneath a world of snow and crime are reporting seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin, standing and staring. And with that plot charge, novelist Martin Cruz Smith is off and running in his latest dark thriller set in the Moscow underworld.
Since his bestselling “Gorky [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Private equity is a fancy name for a simple operation. Big dealmakers round up billions, buy companies, strip them down, add debt and resell. Done right, it can add efficiency to the US economy. Done right or wrong, it can and often does put billions in the pockets of the dealmakers.
Last Friday, [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s officially summertime today, and we all want a dip in the pool. But which pool?
In their heyday, at their best, America’s public swimming pools were cool, blue pleasure zones where happy kids and adults of all stripes showered down and splashed in. But just as often, they were cultural [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Steps and half-steps were taken this week in the news. Immigration hasn’t moved, but the Senate passed an energy bill last night. Yes, it calls for higher mileage cars for the first time in decades, and a lot more ethanol. No, it doesn’t tax oil companies to boost wind [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For most of human history, we had only words to describe human intelligence — bright, dim, genius, fool.
But in the last century, we’ve had numbers — IQ numbers as in “intelligence quotient.” IQ testing made intelligence seem measurable, and humans sortable by the numbers. And sort them we have, into schools and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Texas Congressman and maverick GOP presidential contender Ron Paul is the debate stage wild card in the Republican push for the presidency. In debate after debate, after McCain and Giuliani and Romney and the rest have had their main-line say, Ron Paul turns over the tables.
He trembles with passion as he [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For a ballad of ruin and loss, there is none in the American songbook with more dark power than “House of the Rising Sun.” Everybody’s sung it. Everybody knows it.
The Animals made it a big hit in the 1960s, but its roots go way back. Alan Lomax first heard it [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Right across the planet, good fresh water supplies are under pressure. In America’s West and Southwest, the combination of drought and booming population growth have made that pressure intense.
As the Colorado River and its giant reservoirs have shrunk, Arizona’s population has grown by 40 percent since 1990, and Las Vegas-area water [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Long before he was Pope Benedict the 16th, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was already a fan of Rabbi Jacob Neusner. He called his book “A Rabbi Talks with Jesus,” “by far the most important book in Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade.” Now that he’s Pope, they’re still talking, in the exalted [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In defining his War on Terror, President Bush has not been shy about World War II analogies. Today’s enemies, he has said, are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis.”
But there is at least one big difference. In World War II, Franklin Roosevelt led the country to complete victory over Nazi Germany [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the great explosion of globalization that hit the world in the 1990s, former World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers was boldly front and center, cheering on global markets as, ultimately, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury.
From Washington, Summers went north, to the presidency of Harvard University — where his high-octane, no-holds-barred [...]