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Twenty-one year old Joe Cada won the World Series of Poker and $8.5 million last week in Las Vegas. A heck of a pot for the youngest winner ever.

But fully of a piece, says my guest today, with poker’s fabled place in American history. And in American culture.

Presidents, generals, gangsters, cowboys — and now millions of Americans online — have embraced the part-Puritan, part go-for-it gambler ethos of poker. A new history tells the story.

This hour, On Point: The tangled American roots of poker. And we’ll hear from the 21-year-old who won it all.

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

James McManus, bestselling journalist and author who writes about poker for the New York Times and other publications. His new book is “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker,” came out last month. He came in fifth in the World Series of Poker in 2000 and wrote a memoir about that experience, “Positively 5th Street.”

Read the first chapter of “Cowboys Full” (pdf).

Joseph Cada, winner of the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event. He was 21 when he won on November 10, the youngest champion ever. His winnings totaled $8.5 million.

Laura Lane, co-host of ESPN.com’s Inside Deal, a weekly show about online poker.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, left, and News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch. (AP)

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For a century and more, newspapers made money hand over fist. Then came the Internet.

Now, newspapers are dying. And news giant Rupert Murdoch is getting mad. He’s ready to fight.

Murdoch’s target is the biggest kid on the Internet block: Google. The News Corp chief says Google has essentially been stealing the news from companies like his and giving it away for free. It’s got to stop, he says.

Is Murdoch just blowing smoke?

This hour, On Point: We’ll hear from Jeff Jarvis, Michael Wolf, and Steven Brill — plus Google CEO Eric Schmidt — on Google versus Murdoch.

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the Interactive Program at the City University of New York School of Journalism. His most recent book is “What Would Google Do?” He writes a column on new media for The Guardian and blogs at Buzzmachine.

Michael Wolff, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and founder of the news aggregator Newser.com. He’s author of “The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.”

Steven Brill, media entrepreneur, founder of CourtTV, American Lawyer magazine, and most recently co-founder of Journalism Online, a company whose mission is to help news publishers make the transition to a paid-content model on the Internet.

Apple's iPhone (as shown at apple.com) has plenty of new competition.

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Cell phones blanket the world. Billions of them. But the next phone in your hand — if it’s not there already, on the road, on the move — really isn’t a phone. It’s a computer.

Mobile computing — with powerful smart phones like the iPhone or the new Droid — is exploding in popularity. Big sales. Zillions of “apps.” Lots of power in your pocket.

New users call it a revelation. Industry watchers have long predicted a revolution. Is it here? Is it on?

This hour, On Point: What does it mean for our lives, work and economy when mobile computing goes to critical mass?

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 Austin, Texas, is Omar Gallaga. He writes on technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman and is regular contributor to NPR’s All Tech Considered.

From New York we’re joined by John Abell, New York bureau chief for Wired.com. He directs coverage of business and disruptive media and writes for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog.

And from Los Angeles we’re joined by Jason Calacanis. He’s an Internet entrepreneur who has founded many companies, including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. He’s founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a “human-powered” search engine.

Human memory is a famously tricky thing. We remember some things. We forget a lot more. And we shape and sculpt the memories we do have with a vengeance.

But more and more, the actual events of our lives are being recorded electronically. In Facebook albums and Twitter posts and smartphone files, yes, but also in thousands of digital transactions we don’t even think about.

Now, two top Microsoft computer scientists are talking about an era of e-memory — “total recall” — as a revolution in what it means to be human.

This hour, On Point: E-memory, total recall, and human nature.

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 San Francisco are Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, co-authors of “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.” Bell has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research since 1995.  Prior to that, he was vice president of research and devlopment for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1960 to 1983. He is the first user of “MyLifeBits,” a project funded by Microsoft to experiment with “lifeblogging.” He has been called “the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers.” Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. His work has led to features in Windows XP, Bing.com, and more, and he has worked with Gordon Bell on the MyLifeBits project.

Joining us from New York is Douglas Rushkoff, professor of media studies at the New School University, technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and author of “Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back,” “Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out,” and numerous other books.

A jet fly-by kicks off the aerial festivities celebrating the launch of the new T-Mobile myTouch 3G phone with Google's Android operating system, in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. (AP)

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“Cloud computing” sounds exotic, but it’s becoming absolutely commonplace.

All kinds of computer activity that used to happen in your home or office, on your PC’s local software, is instead happening online. On the Web. In the “cloud.”

Your digital address book is probably there. Your calendar. Your digital photos. And soon, much more — maybe all — of the computing you do will happen far from your desktop. On Internet server farms. In the cloud.

Google and Microsoft are battling there. And a lot more than money may be at stake.

This hour, On Point: Cloud computing and you.

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 Cambridge, Mass., is Jonathan Zittrain, professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.” In a recent op-ed piece for The New York Times, titled “Lost in the Cloud,” he argued that cloud computing “comes with real dangers.”

And joining us from San Francisco is Kara Swisher, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-executive editor of All Things Digital, a website owned by Dow Jones covering technology, the Internet and media.

More:

In a guest post on the On Point blog, Jonathan Zittrain explains why he’s still worried — despite Kara Swisher’s and others’ “utterly reasonable optimism.”

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:

NPR's new president and CEO Vivian Schiller speaks to NPR employees in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2009. (Photo: David Gilkey/NPR)

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There’s news all over today — Cuba, layoffs, pirates, Pakistan — but who’s going to cover it?

National Public Radio — NPR — was born when America’s commercial news business was all grown up and powerful. Now, commercial news is struggling. And NPR is bigger than ever. Fast Company magazine calls NPR “The country’s brainiest, brawniest news-gathering giant.” Says it may end up “saving the news.” That’s a tall order.

In January, Vivian Schiller took over as the brand new president and CEO of NPR. She’s looking at record numbers of listeners, a huge responsibility as newspapers cut back, and challenges of her own at NPR.

This hour, On Point: NPR chief Vivian Schiller on the future of public radio.

You can join the conversation. Why do you think NPR’s audience numbers are up when other news media are on life support? What’s your question for NPR’s new chief on the way ahead?

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Vivian Schiller joins us from Washington, D.C. She came to NPR as president and CEO on January 5, 2009, arriving from The New York Times Company, where she was senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com. Before joining The Times, she spent four years as senior vice president and general manager of the Discovery Times Channel. She has also served as senior vice president of CNN Productions.

More links:

Schiller spoke last month at the National Press Club. Watch the video here.

At the Integrated Media Association’s Public Media conference in February, Schiller and NPR senior VP Kinsey Wilson talked about the role of local stations in covering their communities.

Here’s the Fast Company article, “Will NPR Save the News?”  The tease: “The most successful hybrid of old and new media comes from the last place you’d expect. How NPR’s digital smarts, nonprofit structure, and good old-fashioned shoe leather just might save the news.”

And The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported on NPR’s record ratings last month.

(Image from Facebook.com)

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Facebook just keeps growing. The online social network where people connect and reconnect, post their thoughts, their snapshots, their Facebook friends and latest fancies, had 100 million users last August. 150 million in January.

And yesterday, Facebook confirmed that it had signed up its 200 millionth user.

Broad swaths of young Americans now simply assume they can catch up with anyone, anytime on Facebook. Now older users are pouring in, too. And users around the world.

But as Facebook grows and evolves, so do the questions about where it’s going, where it’s taking us.

This hour, On Point: The age of Facebook, and where the online social network goes next.

You can join the conversation. Is half your life on Facebook? All your life? None of it? Where does Facebook take us?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Vanessa Grigoriadis, contributing editor at New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Her new article, on the cover of New York this week, is “Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?”

BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. His forthcoming book is “The Psychology of Facebook.”

More links:

You can now find On Point on Facebook.

And keep up-to-date with Facebook news at insidefacebook.com.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has been writing enthusiastically about Facebook and social networking. In January he wrote “Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren’t you?”

Less enthusiastic — in fact, downright hostile – is The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash in his hilarious rant last month, “Down With Facebook!”

Photo: csaveanu/flickr

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OK, the April Fool’s computer virus didn’t strike, didn’t rise up with its “botnet” and take over the world. But maybe it didn’t have to.

Just days before, a crack team of computer sleuths in Canada unveiled a global computer spying network, apparently run out of China, called “GhostNet.”

It’s a spying operation that has reached into more than a thousand key computers around the world, rifling through high-security files, even turning on computers’ cameras and microphones to watch and listen from halfway round the world.

This hour, On Point: The team who cracked the “GhostNet.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Toronto is Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the co-lead investigator on the team that exposed “GhostNet.” (Read their report here.) He also teaches political science and is co-founder and a principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor.

Joining us from Washington, D.C., is Rafal Rohozinski, co-lead investigator, with Ron Diebert, on the team that exposed “GhostNet,” and a founder and principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor. He is also a principal at The SecDev Group, a private think tank and consultancy with clients in “countries and regions at risk from violence and insecurity.” Its clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense.

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Siobhan Gorman, intelligence correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Photo by cubicgarden (Flickr)

Cyber-bullying is too mild a term for some of what goes on in the rougher corners of the Internet.

When anonymous online attackers went after two young women at Yale Law School, it had the feel of a gang beating. Maybe worse. Brutal. Obscene. Relentless. And done, it seemed, for fun.

Now the women have pushed back in the courts. Defendants say it’s not their attacks but free speech that’s really under fire. The case may change what you can and cannot say online.

This hour, On Point: Mob psychology, harassment on the web, and how one case may change the rules.

You can join the conversation. Have you seen it? Bullying? Harassment? A mob attack online? Can it, does it, go too far? What about free speech?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

David Margolick, contributing editor at Portfolio magazine. His article “Slimed Online,” about the case of the two Yale law students, appears in the March issue.

Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Maryland. She has written extensively on cyber harassment and the law.  

Anthony Ciolli, University of Pennsylviania Law School graduate and former administrator of the online forum AutoAdmit.

Marc Randazza, attorneywho represented Anthony Ciolli.  He has commented on the case on his blog.

Screen shot from Hulu.com.

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And this just in: American television viewing is at an all-time high.

The latest Nielsen report shows household TV viewing at a record eight hours and eighteen minutes a day. The average American household now has more televisions than people. And many more ways to watch, beyond the television: on the PC, the laptop, the iPod, the cell phone — on Hulu.

Maybe it’s the recession … that we can’t afford to go out. Maybe it’s that screens are everywhere. Maybe television viewing’s triumph is traditional TV’s last hurrah.

This hour, On Point: The triumph of screens, and where TV goes now.

You can join the conversation. Are you watching more? And in more places? More ways? Are your viewing patterns and relationship with TV, with video, changing? How? Tell us.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Frank Rose, contributing editor at Wired magazine and author of the blog Deep Media.  He’s working on a book, “Welcome to the Hyperdrome,” about how story-telling is evolving in the Internet age.

James Poniewozik, TV critic for Time magazine. He writes the Tuned In column, about pop culture and society, as well as the Tuned In blog.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including “Cyberia,” “Media Virus,” “Playing the Future,” and “Coercion,” winner of the 2002 Marshall McLuhan Award.

More links:

Here’s the Los Angeles Times on Nielsen’s new “three screens” report: “Television, Internet and Mobile Usage in the U.S.” Read the full report here (PDF).

See Frank Rose’s Wired article “Free, Legal and Online: Why Hulu Is the New Way to Watch TV.” The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan also wrote about Hulu in a recent column.

The National Security Agency's Threat Operations Center in Fort Meade, Md. (AP)

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In the Bruce Willis thriller “Live Free or Die Hard,” fiendish computer hackers throw the United States into a wild tailspin of fire and flood and national gridlock.

You don’t have to go to the movies to assess this threat. Every hour of every day, global gangs and thinly-veiled government probes are poring through digital America — through corporate secrets and the Pentagon, Obama and McCain campaign files, White House e-mail, front-line American military bases.

A big new report says it has to be stopped. But can it be?

This hour, On Point: Cyber insecurity, out of control.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Siobhan Gorman, intelligence correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Her article in this morning’s paper, “New Cyber Security Push Is Urged,” looks at the recommendations of a report released today by the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency.

From Norwich, Vermont, we’re joined by Scott Borg, director and chief economist at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit research institute that investigates strategic and economic consequences of possible cyber-attacks. He’s a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, which is set to release a new report today urging President-elect Obama to deal head-on with issues of cyber insecurity.

From Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Julie Ryan, associate professor of engineering management, systems engineering, and information secuirty management at George Washington University. She’s been closely following the issues around our cyber security for years.

Joining us from Monterey, Calif., is John Arquilla, professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He specializes in unconventional warfare and terrorism and is the author of “Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military” (2008) and “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy” (2002).

Thanksgiving is upon us. Time to reconnect over the bird and stuffing with family and friends, old memories, maybe new friends and shared intimacies.

But guess what? A new generation of American teens is doing all that every day, nearly every minute of every day — without the turkey — online.

The Internet is producing the most socially plugged in, caught up, networked and aware generation since — what? Maybe the Mayflower.

Parents worry about all that time online. A big new study says, “chill.” The kids are OK.

This hour, On Point: Gen Web speaks, about the new American youth culture unfolding on the Internet.

You can join the conversation. Is your head spinning from all this social media? How do you keep up with all your friends, and how many of them are behind the computer screen?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito, a research scientist at the University of California, Irvine, studying new media use, especially among young people in the U.S. and Japan. She’s the lead researcher on a recently completed three-year study of teens and the Internet by the Digital Youth Project, supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Ebele Anidi, a freshman at Harvard University. He was an intern with On Point last spring.

Anna Huerta, a junior at the University of Southern California, where she studies interactive media.

Sarah Polin, a freshman at Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California.

More links:

You can read a two-page overview of the MacArthur Foundation study, download the 30-page white paper, and examine the full report.

From The Daily Dish (courtesy of TheAtlantic.com).

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The news for the American newspaper industry just gets worse. As circulation numbers continue to slide, once-mighty dailies are cutting more staff and closing bureaus.

And while newspapers continue to lose readers as fast as trees in autumn shed their leaves, a new journalistic landscape is taking shape. There are fewer professional reporters reporting to fewer seasoned editors. But as the traditional journalistic gate-keepers retreat, the Internet is swelling with millions of bloggers and new forms of online publishing.

For many, this is cause for alarm. But one of the blogosphere’s — and print journalism’s — brightest lights, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, makes some bold claims for blogs in a new essay. He says the best kind of blogging could lead to a “golden era for journalism.”

Is he right? This hour, On Point: The state of blogging and the fate of journalism.

You can join the conversation. Where do you get your news? Do you read blogs? What’s lost, and what’s gained, in an era of shrinking newspapers and booming blogs? Tell us what you think.

-Anthony Brooks, guest host

Guests:

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of the widely-read blog The Daily Dish. His essay “Why I Blog,” in which he foresees a new “golden era for journalism,” appears in The Atlantic’s November issue. He’s a former editor of The New Republic and author of several books, most recently “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back.”

Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. In 2006 he wrote an essay for The New Yorker on blogging and online journalism titled “Amateur Hour.” His most recent book is “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.”

Tina Brown, founder and editor in chief of The Daily Beast. She is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines, and is the author of “The Diana Chronicles.”

More links:

David Carr mourns old media’s decline in his New York Times column this morning:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people…. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago….

He goes on to note:

The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there.

In the world of the Internet, Jeff Bezos is a giant. A pioneer. In the old days, they might have said a god.

He started Amazon.com when e-commerce was next to nothing and the web was still a whisper. Today, Bezos is a billionaire, Amazon is ubiquitous, and the web, well, it’s the way we live.

It hasn’t all been pretty. A lot of bookstores have been trampled. Amazon’s balance sheet was touch and go along the way.

But Bezos is still thinking big. From the way we read, to “cloud computing,” to humans in space.

This hour, On Point: Amazon.com founder and chief, Jeff Bezos.

Host Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

The world loves its iPods, iPhones, TiVo, OnStar, XBox and Blackberries. They all run off the Internet. But the Internet was built — and built out — in the age of the personal computer, when anyone could climb on and tinker from their keyboard.

That openness — almost anarchy — made the Net a wide-open realm for innovation. Its dream was liberating everything from data to democracy.

Now, web guru Jonathan Zittrain worries that hyper-convenient but closed products like the iPhone are shutting down the party.

This hour, On Point: The gadgets we love, and the future of the Internet.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jonathan Zittrain, author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It,” professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Adam Thierer, Director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom.

Jay Greene, Seattle bureau chief for BusinessWeek magazine and author of this week’s cover story, “Inside Microsoft’s War Against Google.”

First there was Microsoft, and a colossus made from software for the personal computer. Then those PCs got tied together on the web, and there was Yahoo, a giant hub for e-mail and chat rooms and all the web brought.

Then there was Google, the uber search engine and high-minded master of the Internet universe, with a mountain of web advertising and a vision of Microsoft going the way of the Model T.

Now it’s war. Microsoft is trying to gobble up Yahoo for $44 billion dollars and take on Google.

This hour, On Point: search engine wars, and the battle over the digital future.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kevin Delaney, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covers Silicon Valley and the technology sector.

Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, is author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”

Dylan Tweney, senior editor at Wired and Wired.com.

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 content is pushing deeper onto the Internet and computer screens. It’s old style — like “Lost” and “24.” But it’s also new, like “Prom Queen” and “Funny or Die.” Don’t know those yet? You may soon.

This hour, On Point: TV goes to the web — and change happens.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joseph Menn, media reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

Mark Kvamme, partner at Sequoia Capital and board member of funnyordie.com.

James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.