It’s autumn — football season. And in towns across America, that means big games, halftime, and marching bands.
These days, in many towns and schools, the marching band can be as big a deal as the team. At the Rose Bowl and the Macy’s Parade, they dazzle. But they dazzle too on Friday nights, under the [...]

Protests all over this week: on UAW picket lines outside GM plants while a lightning strike lasted; in New York against Iran’s president; in Washington and Europe against George Bush’s greenhouse gas plans; and in Myanmar, with bloodied monks in the streets and a government crackdown.
Democrat presidential contenders debated again as Hillary seemed to cement [...]

War by war, icon by icon, public television documentarian Ken Burns is putting his trademark video stamp on American history.
With his colossally popular renderings of the Civil War and baseball, Mark Twain and jazz, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark and more, Burns — often with collaborator Lynn Novick — is shaping our collective memory of [...]

The big GM wobble this week over workers and wages and whether its factories will be built in this country was just one more wake-up call. The old world is gone and the new one is going to require a lot more innovation if America is going to stay at the top of the economic [...]

In the world of jazz, saxophone giant John Coltrane was so big, so powerful, so deep, so out there that almost half a century later jazz musicians are still wailing in his shadow.
Coltrane, says New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff, was the John Henry of jazz, the John Wayne, the Paul Bunyon — the [...]

In the neoconservative camp that pushed for war with Iraq, Norman Podhoretz is a great patriarch, one of the old originals. But he’s hardly out to pasture. He’s a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani. He counsels George W. Bush in the White House.
And here’s what he’s saying. We are in the midst of World War [...]

The last time the United Auto Workers went on strike nationally against GM, back in 1970, most Americans alive today had not been born. And that’s not all that’s changed.
The UAW had 400,000 members on strike then. Yesterday, it was a shadow of that — 73,000 — who walked off the job. In 1970, GM [...]

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York has turned into a doozy. The city where Fidel Castro called JFK “ignorant,” Yasser Arafat packed a pistol on his hip, and Nikita Khrushchev banged the UN podium with his shoe, has gone after Ahmadinejad with a vengeance.
“Bearded blowhard” said the New York Post. “Petty, cruel dictator” [...]

After warnings of a possible crackdown from Myanmar’s military junta, thousands of monks and other protestors continued to march, demanding an apology for the beating and arrest of monks in a protest several weeks ago, and the rollback of steep fuel price increases.
Guests:
Simon Montlake, East Asia correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor

It was young men, big money, high-risk and do-or-die, lightning-speed action — and we’re not talking hedge fund traders here. When America was young and the earth’s seas were teeming, the big juicy score, the fast money, was in whaling.
Adventurous risk-takers with their eyes on the golden prize set out on the high seas with [...]

Death and taxes are the two sure things, they say. In the last week, the storm’s been brewing on the tax front. Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan re-emerged to say he never meant to sanction all of George W. Bush’s big tax cuts and the GOP-led spending that rolled right on.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told [...]

What is it about vampires? Halloween is still five weeks away, and already the fake fangy teeth are in the drug store aisles, along with the little kits for applying trickles of blood.
Some ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages cannot seem to get enough of the neck-nuzzling, blood-sucking world of Dracula. Book publishers [...]

It’s been a week of arresting confrontations and odd run-ins. In Baghdad, the Iraqi government wants Blackwater’s burly security men out. In Jena, Louisiana, thousands marched charging racial injustice after nooses and a beating.
Alan Greenspan disses George Bush on spending and taxes. A major Democratic campaign contributor confesses fraud. Israel’s airstrike on Syria is said [...]

Whether you grew up in temple, or church, or the church of rock-and-roll or reggae, you know the Bible’s Book of Psalms. “By the rivers of Babylon.” “Sing a new song.” “Out of the mouths of babes.” “The valley of the shadow of death.”
The Psalms are the song and poetry of the Bible. Poetry of [...]

Iraq has the world’s third largest proven reserves of oil, and they’re barely tapped. This week, the price of oil reached $82 dollars a barrel — the highest in history. And Alan Greenspan says in his new memoir that, at least for him, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was “largely about oil.”
Iraq’s ocean of oil [...]

It’s a hot new TV show about young Americans straining to launch their lives in an uncertain time. And it’s not premiering on TV. The new show, called “Quarterlife,” will premier this fall on the Web. The Internet. Not on the big screen in the family room, but the little ones, all over.
TV and television-style [...]

It was a travesty: crude, privileged white-boy lacrosse players at Duke, raping a black woman for kicks. And then it was a different travesty: innocent young men railroaded by a politically-ambitious prosecutor, and a public too willing to believe.
Race and class stereotypes turned on their heads and unleashed with a vengeance. A media machine and [...]

Twenty years ago, Chicago’s Allan Bloom made a bestselling splash with his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that American universities had walked away from the Western classics and dumbed down American higher education.
Now, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman arrives to say that door is nearly shut. In his new book, [...]

Hillary Clinton got run over by health care reform politics fourteen years ago. Trounced by drug companies and insurers, by Harry and Louise, by ordinary Americans afraid she would limit their health care choices.
Now, years have passed, nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured, millions more live in fear of losing coverage — and Hillary is [...]

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat has astonished readers for more than a decade with the lucid clarity of her prose. In “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” “The Farming of Bones,” “Krik? Krak!” and “The Dew Breaker” she took Americans to her native Haiti and Haitians to America with stunning power.
Now, Danticat is out with a memoir, “Brother, I’m [...]