It is now less than six months to the opening ceremonies of the summer Olympic Games in Beijing. The Olympic torch has begun its journey. Olympic politics — over Tibet and Darfur and more — are in full gear.
And in pools and on tracks and pommel horses across the country, top American athletes are swinging [...]

In this American presidential election year — like none in a long time — the whole world is watching. Really watching. And no zone is watching more closely what Americans decide than Europe.
Forever Europeans were understood as our closest strategic and cultural allies. Then came Bush unilateralism, and the taunt of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”
Now, the [...]

A thousand years ago, from the pueblos of the American southwest to what’s now Cambodia to the wheat fields of northern Europe, the world was in the midst of a great warming.
The years from around 800 to 1300 were a balmy time for some. The Vikings roamed the seas. Europe had lovely long summers.
But for [...]

Home front and war front fireworks this week. In Iraq, black smoke over the fortified Green Zone as rockets rained in. And from Basra to Sadr City, Shiite vs. Shiite violence as the Baghdad government demanded militia disarmament and militia men pushed back, hard. President Bush called it progress. The facts were not so clear.
At [...]

America has a love affair with hamburgers. From the first ones served up at White Castle in Kansas to those Golden Arches and your backyard grill, the burger has worked its way into America’s stomachs and hearts.
Its transformation from German hamburger steak to an American icon is a delicious story, and has more twists and [...]

Here’s a headline you may have missed: a truce has been declared in the great American “Math War.”
For 20-odd years, mathematicians, parents, and teachers have been arguing over the best way to teach your children math. Well, a national panel formed by President Bush two years ago has just issued its findings, and is pushing [...]

Before Elvis jolted the tranquilized ’50s, shocking parents and preachers throughout the land, there were comic books. Years before they rocked to “Hound Dog,” kids ogled the lurid pages of “Chamber of Chills,” “Tomb of Terror” and “My Secret Affair.”
Comics were a booming business — millions of copies sold every week — but they scared [...]

Chuck Hagel, the outspoken Republican senator from Nebraska, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and a leading GOP critic of the Iraq war.
Not so long ago, he was also viewed as an ‘08 presidential contender. But he’s set aside whatever White House ambitions he may have had, and he’s even announced that he won’t be running [...]

It has been scary times for any American with two cents to invest and no idea where to put it. Stock markets — at home and abroad — way off their highs and who knows where the bottom is. Housing prices collapsing. Headlines full of crisis talk and emergency intervention.
The pros say don’t panic, but [...]

Everybody knows the story of John McCain: ex-POW Republican maverick who wants you to know he’s a straight-talker.
Now, the backlash has begun. McCain critics say the presumptive GOP presidential nominee has been given a “free ride” by a press he has thoroughly charmed.
But is charming the press such a crime for a man who would [...]

Humans are supposed to be the thinking species. The planet’s creature of logic. Yet all of literature and abundant human experience tell us otherwise.
Now, a new work of behavioral economics looks at how dependably goofy we humans can be. How “predictably irrational,” whether we’re standing at the all-you-can-eat buffet, or fingering our credit card or [...]

We look at the meaning and uncertain milestone of 4,000 U.S. troops dead in Iraq.
Guests:
Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent for NPR.
Alissa Rubin, Deputy Baghdad Bureau Chief for the New York Times.
Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Rosemary Palmer, mother of Lance Corporal Augie Schraeder who was serving [...]

This week’s show featured a lecture presented by the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University titled “Tyranny Of Choice: How We Become Who We Are.”
The lecturer was Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl, who will be introduced by the Executive Director of the Institute For Human Sciences, Irena Grudzinska-Gross.
Salecl discussed her book in progress, [...]

It’s not easy being Blessed Boykin, Sweet Pitts or Just Desire. But if that’s what your parents named you, that’s what you live with.
And the archives of American names recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau are full of doozeys. Good Knight. Sweet Prince. Zombie Davenport. Hysteria Johnson. Not to mention, of course, the timeless Ima [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook
Five years after the launch of the Iraq war, the shock and awe was on Wall Street this week. Big ups, big downs, and uncharted territory for the Fed and the U.S. economy.
And that was just the start of this week’s news.
Barack Obama raised the bar for American presidential campaign candor on [...]

Five years in, President Bush now says the Iraq war has brought the United States to the brink of a great strategic victory. Many others call the war the greatest strategic blunder in American history.
Either way, there are decisions to be made. If we should stay, how long? If we should go, how fast? How [...]

Five years ago today, the “shock and awe” bombardment was ending in Baghdad, and U.S. troopers were pouring over the border from Kuwait into Iraq.
They were not told to expect a five-year slog: longer, as Barack Obama now puts it, than World War I, longer than World War II, longer than the Civil War.
In this [...]

Telling the story of war is an art, and a jumble. Today, we see television images of shock and awe, bloody children’s slippers, troops at dangerous work, and the sad toll of suicide bombers.
In the heart of the 20th century, it was World War II that gripped the planet. And among its most artful chroniclers [...]

Arthur C. Clarke, the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and widely acclaimed as the 20th century’s greatest science fiction writer — died early Wednesday in Sri Lanka. He was 90 years old. He wrote nearly 100 books.
With his scientific knowledge and his novelist talent he “helped usher in the space age,” as The [...]

Barack Obama’s age of innocence has surely passed, in this long, hard season of campaigning. And now his very candidacy may hang on whether the American people saw him yesterday rising to a higher, wiser plane.
At a podium in Philadelphia, Obama took straight on the issue he has tried to sail above: Race in America. [...]