Claude Levi-Strauss in 1989.

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At the imperial dawn of the 20th century, there was the “civilized” world and the “savage” or “primitive” world, and one felt free to judge the other.

By the century’s end, the whole idea of primitive man as separate from civilized man was pretty well gone. And with it, the “savage mind.”

Much of the banishing was the work of the towering anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss has died at 100 in his native France. We are all, he said, driven by deep myth and common structures of thinking — even to our own extinction.

This hour, On Point: The mind and work of Claude Levi-Strauss.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Nur Yalman, professor emeritus of social anthropology at Harvard University. He is also a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and has looked at issues of cultural diversity and international conflict. His 1967 book “Under the Bo Tree: Studies of Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon” was influenced by Levi-Strauss’s work. Most recently he’s co-author of “A Passage to Peace: Global Solutions from East and West.”

Rosemary Joyce, chair of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also an archaeologist whose primary work is in Central and South America, with a focus on Honduras. Her books include “Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives” and “Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice.”

The "This Old House" Newton Centre Project 2009, in Newton, Mass., as shown on the Old House My House blog (click the image above).

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Americans love homes and fixing them up. In 1979, there was a lone public television show devoted to the task, the art. “This Old House” set out to make the magic of renovation and repair accessible — and became a huge national hit.

This year, “This Old House” turns thirty. The landscape outside has changed. An epic housing bust. A raft of commercial shows from “Extreme Makeover” to “Flipping Out” grabbing at the tool belt.

This hour, On Point: Norm Abram, Kevin O’Connor, and more, on “This Old House” at thirty.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kevin O’Connor is now in his sixth season as host of “This Old House” and “Ask This Old House.”  He is also on the editorial board of This Old House magazine.

Norm Abram, master carpenter of “This Old House” since the show’s premiere in 1979. He was also host of “The Yankee Workshop,” which ran for 21 seasons. He serves on the editorial board of This Old House magazine and has his own column, Norm’s Notebook.

Deborah Hood, senior series producer at “This Old House,” where she started in 2002 as an associate producer.

More links:

On Point got a tour of the current project site in Newton, Mass. In this video Tom Ashbrook talks with Tom Silva, general contractor for “This Old House”:

Image from the website of FOX's "More to Love" (fox.com/moretolove).

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Americans are bigger than ever, by a long shot. Heavier. Fatter.

And maybe more culturally torn than ever over fat. A broad swath of the country has just accepted a heavier profile as the way it is. The way we are. In TV’s “More to Love” and plus-size model Glamour shots, heavy is fine.

But the backlash is fierce, too. Jessica Simpson pummeled for a few extra pounds. Fat disdain aplenty. And the health care debate highlighting the cost of obesity in health care budgets out of control.

This hour, On Point: Overweight America — accepted or rejected — and the cost of our pounds.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Kate Dailey, health and lifestyles editor for Newsweek and writer of Newsweek’s blog The Human Condition, where she’s been following the debate over American weight. She edited and wrote for Newsweek’s recent series “The Fat Wars.”

In our studio we’re joined by Lesley Kinzel. She runs the blog Fatshionista, “a heady mixture of social justice, fat-girl memoir, and popular culture.”  She has been engaging in fat activism and social justice politics for over a decade. When not blogging, she works in higher education in the Boston area.

And from Washington we’re joined by Kenneth E. Thorpe, executive director of Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, executive director of the Emory Institute for Advanced Policy Solutions, and chairman of the department of health policy and management at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. His Sept. 10 Newsweek commentary, “We Have the Power to Change Our Weight,” argues that obesity is a health and an economic crisis.

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The Wu Tang Clan came out of New York hip hop in the 1990s — intense, poetic, rough, and huge. Nine emcees. Method Man. Ghostface Killah. U-God. Raekwon.

And behind it all — The RZA, aka Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, son of Staten Island, mean streets, and his adopted spiritual home: China’s Shaolin Temple and the realm of Kung Fu movies.

The RZA was a kind of mad genius in the Wu Tang Clan mix. Now he’s sharing his way. A little Buddha. A little Allah. A little Jesus. And a lot of kung fu.

This hour, On Point: The Tao of Wu. And the RZA.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

The RZA joins us from New York. Rapper, producer, and composer, he’s the driving force behind the hugely influential, martial-arts inspired hip-hop empire The Wu-Tang Clan. Born Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, he’s had success as a solo artist under several names -- Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital, the Rzarector. He’s scored movies, including Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” and the anime series “Afro Samurai.” His 2005 book “The Wu-Tang Manual” explained the history and mythology of The Wu-Tang Clan. His new book, out yesterday, is “The Tao of Wu.” 

More links:

In a 2007 Wired magazine feature, the RZA explained the kung fu movie source material and samples in a number of Wu Tang Clan songs.

You can watch a collection a videos at RZA’s MySpace page.  And here’s the trailer for 2008’s “You Can’t Stop Me Now” (as Bobby Digital):

Lemon Andersen (www.lemonshood.com)

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Lemon Andersen grew up hard in Brooklyn. His parents, drug addicts. His toys, syringes. He lost his stepfather at 12. His father at 14. His mother, to AIDS, at 15.

Lemon dealt crack. Did time at Riker’s Island. Got out. Found himself on stage and began to talk.

He shared a Tony for Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam. Now he’s opening a one-man show, at the Public Theater in New York, on hard times and redemption.

One critic calls him “a choir boy with a shiv in his robe.”

This hour, On Point: Lemon Andersen, on coming up hard — and his new show, “County of Kings.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Lemon Andersen is a poet, writer and actor. He was an original cast member of the Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and a regular on HBO’s Def Poetry runs.  He’s acted in three Spike Lee films: “Sucker Free City,” “She Hate Me” and “Inside Man.” He has written and is starring in the one-man Public Theater show “County of Kings,” which opens next Monday. The show is about his life. Spike Lee, a mentor of Andersen’s, is one of its producers.

More links:

“When Life Names You Lemon…” -- The New York Times’ Deborah Sontag profiles Lemon Andersen.

Here’s Lemon performing “Poor People” from a 2005 episode of Def Poetry:

Multitasking in the park. (Flickr/CarbonNYC)

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Americans love to be horrified by multitasking. Well, some Americans.

For many younger Americans, it’s just life. Especially “media multitasking.” Phoning, texting, reading, tweeting, with a movie on the laptop, a video chat in the corner, IM on the side. And — God forbid — maybe driving, too.

A new study out of Stanford seems to confirm the worst fears about multitasking — that in the midst of all the “multi,” nothing gets done well. This hour, we’ll talk with an author of that study — and with two twenty-somethings who say it’s just life.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Stanford, Calif., is Clifford Nass, professor of communications at Stanford University. He founded and directs the CHIMe Lab for the study of “communication between humans and interactive media.” The results of his multitasking study were published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You can read it here.

From Pittsburgh, we’re joined by Marcel Just, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-directs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging.

Joining us in our studio is Vivian Ho, a junior at Boston University. She’s editor-in-chief of Boston University’s Daily Free Press.

Also in our studio we’re joined by Jack Lepiarz, a senior at Emerson College in Boston. He’s the news director for WERS, the Emerson College radio station.

For the second year running, top honors at the Emmys for best dramatic series went to an AMC cable show set in a New York ad agency in the early 1960s.

The visuals of AMC’s “Mad Men” are all skinny ties and bullet bras — buttoned-down corporate America smoking and drinking and dancing on the edge of what we know would be assassinations and war and 1960s cultural revolution to come.

Its world is white, sexist, racist, homophobic, shadowed by fear of nuclear war — and compelling, right now, in 2009.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Matthew Weiner, creator of “Mad Men.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Matthew Weiner joins us from Los Angeles. He is executive producer and creator of the AMC show “Mad Men,” now in its third season. This week it won its second Emmy for best drama series, as well as its second Emmy for writing in a drama series. Before creating “Mad Men,” Weiner was executive producer and writer on the HBO series “The Sopranos.”

You can watch “Mad Men” episodes online at the AMC site, which also offers a 5-minute recap of “the story so far.” Here’s a promo for Season 3:

Isabella Rossellini, photographed at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009. (AP)

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Actress, model, and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini has known years as one of the world’s most beautiful, most photographed women.

Five hundred magazine covers — Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair. Famous screen roles — “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “30 Rock.” Famous parents — Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini. Famous lovers — David Lynch, Martin Scorsese.

Famous independence of mind.

Now Isabella Rossellini has taken her talents, humor, and iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.

This hour, On Point: Isabella Rossellini on starfish love, environmentalism, and her new series, “Green Porno.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Isabella Rossellini joins us from Southampton, NY. An actress, model, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter, she produces, directs, and stars in “Green Porno,” a series of film shorts on sex in nature, for the Sundance Channel.  Daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, she’s starred in numerous movies, including “Blue Velvet,” “Big Night,” “Fearless,” and many more.

More links:

A “Green Porno” book and DVD set are due out Sept. 22. You can watch a number of the short films on YouTube, like this one, “Preying Mantis”:

And here she is in an unforgettable scene from “Blue Velvet”:

Left to right: Advertisement for "Glee" on Fox; Joseph Fiennes in ABC's “FlashForward”; the CW's "The Vampire Diaries"; and Courtney Cox in "Cougar Town."

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It’s that time again — TV’s fall lineup. You know you love it. What’s on tap?

Kids trying out for the glee club. A modern family’s two husbands bringing home the baby from a foreign country. And Courtney Cox in “Cougar Town,” which defies description.

But we’ll go there anyway — with television critics who’ve got the skinny on Jay Leno’s new show … “NCIS: Los Angeles” … the sci-fi “FlashForward” … and the big question: is good comedy making a comeback on network TV?

This hour, On Point: grab your popcorn, we’re hitting the couch for some quality tube time.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Aaron Barnhart, TV critic for the Kansas City Star.  Here are his predictions on what people will watch.

Maureen Ryan, TV critic for the Chicago Tribune.

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

 

They started out taping street musicians all over the world, and layering the tracks — Spain on Nepal on South Africa on New Orleans — until they had a kind of global street symphony.

Then came video, and Bono, and PBS, and a distribution deal with Starbucks.

And suddenly they had a kind of global movement. They call it “Playing for Change.”

This hour, “Playing for Change” creator Mark Johnson on the world and song.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Santa Monica, California, is Mark Johnson, Grammy-award winning music producer and founder of “Playing for Change,” a multimedia music project. Their CD/DVD is “Playing for Change: Songs Around the World.”  Mark directed and produced the documentary “Playing for Change: Peace Through Music,” which is airing on PBS this month.

And from Los Angeles we’re joined by Rocky Dawuni. Called “Ghana’s Bob Marley” by the UK’s New Nation newspaper, he debuted on the African reggae scene in 1996, and is featured in “Playing for Change” on the songs “War/No More Trouble” and “Biko.”

The Playing for Change band is on tour this fall.  Check their schedule here.

Here’s “Stand By Me,” the “Playing for Change” YouTube hit:

And here’s Bob Marley’s “War/No More Trouble” featuring Rocky Dawuni and U2’s Bono on lead vocals:

Ever since the notion of Original Sin, there has been a tug of war over the essential goodness of humankind.

But whether or not you believe that we’re innately given to be good, you might wonder how likely we are to do good — to practice, as our guest Adam Phillips puts it, acts of true kindness.

In an America with feuding, greedy housewives in prime time, and a business culture driven by reckless self-dealing, kindness hardly looks like a priority — much less an essential ingredient of human happiness, Phillips says, as it was once believed to be. He argues that we’ve grown afraid of kindness, wary of it — that it’s become dangerous to practice.

This hour, On Point: kindness, how we lost it, and the case for bringing it back.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Adam Phillips, co-author, with historian Barbara Taylor, of “On Kindness.” He is a psychoanalyst in London and the author of twelve books, including “On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored,” “Going Sane,” and “Side Effects.”

And with us in our studio is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

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Originally broadcast on April 1, 2008.

The world is too much with us, goes the sonnet. And in fourteen lines we’re off, into the “jewel box” of poetic form. How do I love thee? Death, be not proud. My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.

For five hundred years and more, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ginsburg and Seamus Heaney, the sonnet has beguiled and teased and thrilled — and informed us on the human condition.

How do they do it? Many ways. “You jerk, you didn’t call me up,” starts one.

A new anthology tells the story. This hour, On Point: the making of the sonnet.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Edward Hirsch, a poet and essayist, is co-editor (with Eavan Boland) of the Norton anthology, “The Making of a Sonnet.”

Eavan Boland, co-editor of “The Making of a Sonnet,” is a poet and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University.

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This segment was originally broadcast April 16, 2009.

Long before “Dancing with the Stars” brought rappers and bullriders to the ballroom floor, there was Fred Astaire, bringing song and dance to the big screen.

In musicals from “Top Hat” to “Funny Face” and “Silk Stockings,” he wooed Hollywood’s leading ladies — and viewers around the world — with his elegance, grace, and impeccable dance.

Cultural critic Joseph Epstein brings a fresh take to the story of Fred Astaire, from vaudeville days to enduring icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

This hour, On Point: The art and life of the extraordinary Fred Astaire.

You can join the conversation. Did you grow up watching Fred Astaire’s footwork in movies like “Top Hat,” “Swing Time,” and “The Gay Divorcee”? Does “Puttin’ On the Ritz” make you get up and dance?

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Evanston, Illinois, is Joseph Epstein, essayist and bestselling author of “Snobbery: The American Way” and “Friendship: An Expose.” His new book, “Fred Astaire,” appears in the “Icons of America” series from Yale University Press. Read an excerpt (pdf).

From New York, we’re joined by Elizabeth Kendall, dance critic and author of “The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy in the 1930’s” and, most recently, “Autobiography of a Wardrobe.” She’s a professor at Eugene Lang College, The New School of Liberal Arts.

You can see our Web special featuring Fred Astaire’s reflections on his own life.

Here’s Fred Astaire and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” …

Here’s Astaire and Ginger Rogers in “Swing Time” …

And here they are “Dancing Cheek to Cheek”…

Postcards submitted to the website postsecret.com.

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Life is full of secrets. And now, so is the Web.

Online confessional sites are brimming with the most intimate and awkward details of human comedy and tragedy. Human life. The posts are anonymous. Nakedly revealing. And apparently addictive for readers and posters alike.

“I love you, but I hate your tattoos.” … “Today my husband found the box my morning-after pill came in. He had a vasectomy ten years ago.”

This hour, On Point: We’ll talk with the founder of postsecret.com, the moderator of fmylife.com, and a clinical psychologist about naked human secrets, online.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Frank Warren, founder and curator of PostSecret. He started it as a community art project in Nov. 2004. Since then, he’s received nearly half a million anonymous postcards with secret confessions. He posts a weekly selection at postsecret.com, which gets over a million viewers per month. He’s also compiled four bestselling PostSecret books; his fifth, out this fall, is PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God.

Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and professor of the social studies of science and technology.  She’s author of “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet” (1995). Her new book is “Simulation and Its Discontents.”

Alan Holding, site moderator for FMyLife.com, which gets 1.7 million visitors per day.  Their new book, out yesterday, is “FMyLife: It’s Funny, It’s True, Except When it Happens to You.”

Watch the video trailer for PostSecret:

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The classical guitar — and for that matter, the instrumental root of every head-banging Guitar Hero rocker — goes back to the lute and Spanish vihuela.

In the 18th century, the modern six-string guitar emerged for a heyday. It came back, classically, with Spanish great Andres Segovia in the 1920s. And half a century later, Segovia handed the tradition to a young Eliot Fisk.

Now virtuoso in his own right, Fisk carries the torch for a musical tradition — and a role for the guitar as exquisite cultural bridge.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with classical guitar virtuoso Eliot Fisk.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Eliot Fisk joins us in our studio. He is a world-renowned classical guitarist, one of the great Andres Segovia’s last students. Segovia called him “brilliant, intelligent, and gifted,” an artist “at the top line of our artistic world.” King Juan Carlos of Spain honored his contributions to Spanish music. He teaches at the Universitat Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He’s founder and artistic director of Boston Guitarfest, an international festival now in its fourth year.

Here’s a (very casual) video of Eliot doing his sound check  in our studio before the show. He’s practicing the “Phrygian Pick,” from the final movement of Robert Beaser’s Guitar Concerto.  He talks with On Point producer Stefano Kotsonis. The video was shot by our intern Molly Connors:

And here you can watch Eliot perform an excerpt from the final movement of Guitar Concerto — which premiered at Carnegie Hall last month — for Tom and members of the On Point staff in our studio after the show:

Following is the playlist of pieces heard during the broadcast, in the order in which they were played:

1. Manuel Ponce: Prelude
from “Segovia: Canciones Populares” (1996 CD)

2. Recuerdos de la Alhambra (Memories of the Alhambra), by Francesco Tarrega (Granada, 1896)
LIVE

3. Spanish Dance No. 5 by Enrique Granados
A duet by Eliot Fisk & Angel Romero at Boston Guitarfest 2008.

4. Finlandesa: Quasi Andante
from “Segovia: Canciones Populares” (1996 CD), a Finnish folk tune transcribed by Andrés Segovia

5. Two Pieces from Siglo de Oro: “Cancion del Emperador” (Narvaez-Josquin, 1538) and “Fantasia Que Contrahace la Harpa de Ludovico” (Alonso Mudarra, 1546, Seville)
LIVE IN STUDIO

6. Scarlatti: Sonata in A Major
A duet by Eliot Fisk & the great Mexican castanet player Lucero Tena.

7. Paganini: Capriccio No. 23 in E-Flat Minor
Version 1 (guitar): From “Paganini: 24 Caprices”(1992 CD by Eliot Fisk).

Version 2 (violin):  From “Paganini: 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Op. 1” (1989 CD by Midori).

8. Two Etudes by Leo Brouwer (b. 1939)
LIVE IN STUDIO

9. Ciaccona by Johann Sebastian Bach
LIVE IN STUDIO

10. Paganini: Capriccio No. 24 in A Minor
from “Paganini: 24 Caprices”(1992 CD)

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If you’ve ever wondered who makes America’s popular culture pop and sizzle and shake on cable TV, think Lauren Zalaznick.

She’s a hot-as-a-pistol rising media mogul. President of NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks. The boss at cable networks Bravo and Oxygen. The power behind “Top Chef,” “Real Housewives of New Jersey,” “Tori & Dean,” and the charmingly-named reality weight-loss show, “Dance Your Ass Off.”

Who comes up with this stuff? She does.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with pop culture mogul, Lauren Zalaznick.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Lauren Zalaznick is President of NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, overseeing the cable networks Bravo, Oxygen and the women’s web site iVillage. She also heads up Women@NBCU, a sales and marketing initiative to target women viewers.

In this photograph by Russell Lee, the Faro Caudill family eats dinner in Pie Town, New Mexico, in October 1940 (Library of Congress). Click image for more info.

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In the last years of the 1930s, the last years before interstates and industry turned America into one big, homogenized market, Depression-era writers went out to see what Americans were eating.

They went North, South, East and West. Today, their report reads like a wildly diverse national potluck of very regional, very vivid cuisine.

Spoon bread and burgoo, oyster stew and chicken bog, hush puppies and possum, Johnny cake and hoecake and rabbit and grunion.

This hour, On Point: What we ate before we all ate the same. We’ll read the great American menu — and tuck in.

You can join the conversation — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Mark Kurlansky, bestselling author of many books, including “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World” and “Salt: A World History.” His new anthology is “The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food -- from the Lost WPA files.”

Also in our studio is JJ Gonson, a personal chef with a background in short order and home cooking. Boston Magazine named her “Boston’s Best Personal Chef.” She’s founder of Cuisine En Locale, based in Cambridge, Mass., and writes an eponymous blog, where she’s just written about food shopping and economies of scale.

In this video clip, Tom and our guests sample tastes of the ’30s…

Here’s our tasting menu for this hour. These are authentic 1930s dishes taken from Mark Kurlansky’s book.

Plain Maine Chowder
from the recipe of Mabel G. Hall, a Maine historian

- Ingredients: diced salt pork, onions, potatoes, water, salt, a very little bit of milk

Kentucky Wilted Lettuce
“Throughout Kentucky, and particularly in the mountainous area, wilted lettuce is certain to appear on the table of most every household that has a garden.”

- Ingredients: fresh lettuce, fresh green onions, salt, pepper, bacon, bacon grease

Arizona Menudo
from a description of an “Arizona Menudo Party” by J. Del Castillo

- Ingredients: beef tripe, hominy, salt, pepper

Depression Cake (far western U.S.)
from an essay by Michael Kennedy and Edward B. Reynolds, a cake born out of necessity by a woman preparing for a July 4 “picnic, rodeo, and general get-together”

- No eggs, butter, or milk.
- Ingredients: raisin water, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, allspice, bacon drippings, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder.

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Colson Whitehead has been a blazing young star on the literary scene. Black, urbane, gifted, showered with honors: from “The Intuitionist” and “John Henry Days” to “The Colossus of New York” he’s made glittering waves.

His new novel, “Sag Harbor,” is the opposite of blazing. It’s about boys and warm, lazy days summering and coming of age on Long Island in the 1980’s.

But it’s not the stereotype. It’s black boys with beach houses, he writes. Sons of well-set parents. Scooping ice cream. Kicking back. Coming to terms with life and race.

This hour, On Point: Colson Whitehead and “Sag Harbor.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Colson Whitehead joins us from New York  His new novel is “Sag Harbor.” He’s the author of five previous novels, including “The Intuitionist,” “John Henry Days,” “The Colossus of New York,” and “Apex Hides the Hurt.”  He’s the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.

You can read an excerpt from “Sag Harbor” at RandomHouse.com.

More links:

Whitehead created this annotated map of Main Street Sag Harbor for The Wall Street Journal.

And here he is in a YouTube video walking around Sag Harbor, talking about the book and its backstory:

A scene from Star Trek (2009), with Chris Pine, left, as James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock.

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Suddenly, everything old is new again in the warp-speed world of Star Trek.

Forty-three years after Captain Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty and the starship Enterprise first hit television screens in a burst of 1960s deep space idealism, Star Trek is back, in movie theaters, in what critics are calling the “ultimate prequel.”

Kirk’s a baby and bad-boy up-and-comer. Spock’s old and very young. The Enterprise is on its maiden voyage. And it’s pretty great.

This hour, On Point: Leonard Nimoy — Mr. Spock himself — joins us for a sweet fresh blast of Star Trek.

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Leonard Nimoy. He played Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek series in the 1960s and in six subsequent feature films.  He returns as Spock Prime in the new Star Trek film.

From New York we’re joined by Steve Daly. An entertainment writer and film critic, he contributes to Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly.  His article “We’re All Trekkies Now” was on the cover of Newsweek’s May 4 issue.

Joining us from Columbia, S.C., is Ina Rae Hark, professor of English and film at the University of South Carolina and author of “Star Trek” in the British Film Institute’s “Classic TV” series.

More links:

The official website for Star Trek (2009) is pretty slick. You can watch the trailer here (from YouTube):

You can watch full episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, on the CBS YouTube Channel.

Here’s an essay by former Star Trek writer Leonard Mlodinow on making The Next Generation.

Check out “Highly Illogical,” the video for a Leonard Nimoy song first released on his 1967 album “Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space.”  You can hear more of his music at his MySpace page.

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Bob Dylan, almost 68 now, is America’s grand old man of … what? Folk? Rock? Touring honky tonk? Everything?

He’s out with his 33rd studio album, called “Together Through Life.” It’s #1 in the UK. He’s touring — a hundred gigs a year. And just lately, he’s been talking — not to a music critic, but to a bonafide historian, Douglas Brinkley.

Brinkley followed Dylan through Europe on his “never-ending tour.” His interviews became the cover story of this month’s Rolling Stone. Dylan talked about Texas, Elvis, patriotism, morality. About Duluth and Neil Young and Marcus Aurelius and Caravaggio.

This hour, On Point: Douglas Brinkley on Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone.

It’s been a long time since Blowin’ in the Wind. Since Blood on the Tracks. What does this man, this artist, this American mean to you? How do you see Bob Dylan? Tell us — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Douglas Brinkley joins us from Austin, Texas.  He’s a professor of history at Rice University and author of Rolling Stone’s current cover story, “Bob Dylan’s America” (not available online). He’s the editor of “Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954″ and two volumes of letters of his late friend Hunter S. Thompson, “The Proud Highway” and “Fear and Loathing in America” (a third and final volume is on the way). The author of many works of history and current affairs, on subjects from Hurricane Katrina to Henry Ford, he’s also profiled Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut for Rolling Stone.

More links:

David Fricke reviews “Together Through Life” in Rolling Stone.

Dylan’s own vast website has news about his tour, as well as a complete discography and an archive of song lyrics.

Here’s Dylan goofing in that 1965 press conference in San Francisco:

And in a different vein, On Point’s Wen Stephenson was moved by a moment in Brinkley’s piece where Dylan pays tribute to Neil Young (you can watch videos of Young and Dylan covering the other’s songs).