Some of the several hundred "Tea Party Express" protesters who demonstrated in Las Vegas on Monday, Aug. 31, 2009. (AP)

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Americans sure look angry. Sometimes, lethally. The IRS attack in Texas. Campus killer Amy Bishop in Alabama.

And then there’s media pundit rage, and Tea Party rage, and anti-Wall Street rage, and the slow boil anger of the broke and out of work.

There are reaons. And it’s not the first angry season in American history. But it sure is vivid — in a time of 24-hour cable magnification and the easy rant on the web.

The anger can, and does, come right into our personal lives. It imbues our public arena. What’s the effect?

This hour, On Point: Anger in America, and where it’s taking us now. 

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and a  former professor of anthropology at Boston University. He’s author of “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America.”

Paul Starobin, staff correspondent at National Journal and contributing editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of “After America: Narratives for a Global Age.”

Tiger Woods during a news conference in, Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. (AP)

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Sex addiction has been all over the headlines lately. Tiger Woods put it there this time. And before him, David Duchovny and Michael Douglas and Susan Cheever, and plenty more.

But what is sex addiction, and how is it different from just a lot of sex, or from plain old philandering? And is it for real? Or just a convenient tag that lets Hollywood cads pose as victims themselves?

Tiger’s millions helped turbo-charge his sex life, but what about ordinary people and compulsion? Where’s the line?

This hour, On Point: we’re bringing in the experts to assess sex addiction.

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kenneth Adams, clinical psychologist and certified sexual addiction therapist who has treated patients for over 25 years.  He’s clinical director for the Program for Sexual Health and Addiction, an outpatient program that treats sexual compulsion and addiction.  He’s co-editor, with Patrick Carnes, of “Clinical Management of Sex Addiction.”

Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she teaches one of the school’s most popular courses on the sociology of sexuality.   She’s author of dozens of papers and academic papers on sexuality, and a consultant to the Lluminari Women’s Health Network.

Everybody knows a hypochondriac, obsessed with health and illness. Few admit to being one.

But history is littered with great thinkers and artists who were morbidly obsessed with dysfunction and disease. Moliere, Kant, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Mann all wrote of the syndrome. Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, Charlotte Bronte, Glenn Gould all had it. Maybe Michael Jackson and Woody Allen, too.

In the era of the “worried well,” we may all have a touch. This hour, On Point: illness, imagination, and tales of the eminent hypochondriacs.

Plus, later this hour, we’ll remember the people’s historian, Howard Zinn.

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from Tunbridge Wells, England, is Brian Dillon, author of “The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives.” Dillon’s first book, “In the Dark Room,” won the 2006 Irish Book Award for nonfiction. He is UK Editor for Cabinet, an arts and culture quarterly, and a research fellow at the University of Kent.

Read an excerpt from “The Hypochondriacs.”

Remembering Howard Zinn

Later this hour, we look back at groundbreaking American historian Howard Zinn, dead at 87. Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” died of a heart attack yesterday in Santa Monica, California. An icon of the left, he turned the standard American historical narrative on its head — elevating the voices of workers, feminists, and war protesters. 

Joining us from Princeton, New Jersey, is Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He’s the author most recently of “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism.” 

Zinn had twice been a guest on our show. In 2002, he discussed the war on terror in its early days.  And in 2006, as war raged on in Iraq, Zinn joined us to discuss the futility of war.

It’s the season of giving — and that’s lasted for a reason. First, there’s need. Second, giving makes us feel better. Live better.

Cami Walker found that out the hard way. At 32, just a month after her wedding, she was diagnosed with painful multiple sclerosis. Nothing made her feel better.

Until, from the depth of her pain, she started giving to others. Just little things at first. Then more. For twenty-nine straight days.

And the giving, she says, brought her back. Science says she may be right.

This hour, On Point: in the season of giving, the power of the gift.

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 Los Angeles is writer Cami Walker. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006. Her new book is called “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life.” She is the creator of the online community 29-Day Giving Challenge.

Read an excerpt from “29 Gifts.”

With us in our studio is Patricia Rogers, a psychotherapist in private practice. She’s counseled individuals, couples and families for over 20 years.

And joining us from Stony Brook, New York, is Stephen Post. He is director for the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University. He co-authored the book “Why Good Things Happen to Good People.”

A page from Carl Jung's "Red Book," 1914-1930, to be published next month. (Courtesy of W.W. Norton)

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Carl Jung was a giant in the dawn of the age of psychoanalysis. A student of Freud who broke with Freud. Champion of the individual spiritual quest as doorway to the universal.

In midlife, he looked for his own soul and found nothing. Dug deeper, for years, late at night, recording wild visions: gods and demons, winged snakes and crocodiles. Found his soul’s footing, but feared he’d be called insane.

Jung said his “red book,” in which he recorded his visions, was the base of everything else he did. But it was locked away for years in a Swiss vault. Now it’s out. We have it.

This hour, On Point: Carl Jung’s red book.

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 Portland, Maine, is Sara Corbett, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her article “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious,” about Carl Jung’s “Red Book,” appears in the September 20 issue of the magazine. The book will be published by W.W. Norton next month.

And with us  in our studio is David Oswald, a licensed Jungian analyst and graduate the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. He is a member of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology.

More links:

The New York Times Magazine offers these color photographs of several facing pages from Jung’s “red book.”

We’ve posted some more images of individual pages, courtesy of W.W. Norton.

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:

A shopper walks through downtown Seattle Wednesday, April 29, 2009. (AP)

Forty-plus years ago, psychologists sat kids down in front of a tasty marshmallow to see who could wait the longest before grabbing and eating when the prize was double the treat.

Years later they looked back, and guess what? The kids who could wait were far more successful in many aspects of life.

Now that America is on a forced march from the “instant gratification society” to a world of delayed gratification, that science is turning heads again.

This Hour, On Point: we’ll look at willpower and winners in the new American economy.

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Science writer Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired, and author of “How We Decide” and “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” His new piece, in this week’s New Yorker, is “Don’t! The secret of self-control.”

Psychologist Walter Mischel is a professor at Columbia University, and author of “Personality and Assessment.” He pioneered the “marshmallow experiments” in the 1960’s, which studied delayed gratification and self-control in children.

Economic historian Richard Sylla is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and author of “The American Capital Market: 1846-1914″ and “A History of Interest Rates.”

More links:

Listen to Radiolab’s take on “Mischel’s Marshmallows”

Here’s ABC’s version of the marshmallow experiment, with M&M’s and the Dilley Sextuplets:

Dara Torres at the US Olympic swimming trials in Omaha, Neb., July 3, 2008. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

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Getting to the Olympics — not to mention winning gold there — takes more than worldclass physical ability. As athletes and coaches know all too well, the competitive edge is as much in the mind.

So are the challenges. How does it feel to be U.S. hopeful Eric Shanteau, postponing cancer treatment to swim 200 meters in Beijing? Or China’s star hurdler, Liu Xiang, with the pride of 1.3 billion people riding on his every step?

The head games can be brutal. What is it like to be U.S. swimmer Dara Torres, staging an Olympic comeback at 41, while her coach is home battling a potentially deadly blood disorder? To be basketball star Yao Ming, Team China’s hope against the U.S., whose injured foot became a Chinese national obsession?

This hour, On Point: The minds of Olympians, and what it takes to get to Beijing.

You can join the conversation. What does it take to go for the gold? To win it? Sheer guts? Good genes? A streak of crazy? Have you done it yourself? Do you know someone who has? Who are you pulling for in Beijing? Tell us what you think.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Alex Wolff. He’s a senior staff writer for Sports Illustrated, covering his fifth Summer Games. He takes a special interest in basketball.

Joining us from Stanford, California, is JoAnn Dahlkoetter. She’s a world-class athlete, winner of the San Francisco marathon in 1980, and a sports psychologist who works with Olympic athletes. She’s the author of “Your Performing Edge: The Total Mind-body Program for Excellence in Sports, Business and Life.” She is currently working with 2008 U.S. Olympic marathoner Magdalena Lewy Boulet, now in Beijing.

And joining us from Mars Hill, North Carolina, is Nancy Hogshead-Makar. A U.S. Olympic swimmer, she won three gold medals and one silver at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. She was a teammate of Dara Torres in the 4×100-meter relay that clinched a team gold in 1984. She’s now a professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law and is a major advocate of gender equity in sports.

Links and Multimedia:

Beijing ‘08 – SI.com
Sports Illustrated’s comprehensive coverage of the Beijing Olympics.

“After the Games”
An interactive multimedia feature from The New York Times’ Play Magazine, in which “eight Olympic legends discuss their greatest athletic moments and life after competition.” Also, “The State Requests That Citizen Liu Win Gold,” looks at the intense pressure on China’s star hurdler Liu Xiang.

Beijing Beat – Newsweek
Newsweek’s Olympic blog keeps an eye on what’s happening beyond the sports.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows
Always worth reading, Fallows is on a long-term assignment for The Atlantic, first in Shanghai and now Beijing, and has been blogging about the run-up to the Olympics.

Beijing 2008
The official site of the 2008 Beijing Games.

Plus, listen back to On Point’s show on China and the Olympics in April, live from Shanghai.

And remember these?  See a YouTube video of some great Olympic Moments:

So much has been written about the search for happiness — in songs and poems and countless self-help books — much of it straight from the heart.

But it turns out there’s also a science of happiness, and in her new book a psychologist lays out the cold, hard facts, based on decades of research.

Did you know you have a happiness “set point”? What do you really need to be happy?

Her book is part science, part self-help, with questionnaires and exercises. We’ll give it a try.

This hour, On Point: mapping happiness

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at the University of Riverside and author of “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.”

Eric Wilson, professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of “Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.”

Here’s the dramatic set-up for the new HBO series “In Treatment”: you’re a fly on the wall in the psychotherapist’s office.

For one half hour, every night of the week, a patient walks in, sits down and talks. A young gymnast too close to her coach. A Navy pilot who accidentally bombed an Iraqi school. A couple in counseling over an abortion. A beauty, falling for the therapist. A therapist himself in therapy.

This hour On Point: Actor Blair Underwood, director Rodrigo Garcia, a real therapist and you put the show — and the country — on the couch.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Rodrigo Garcia, executive producer, director, and writer of HBO’s “In Treatment.”

Blair Underwood, an actor, he plays the role of Alex, an arrogant Navy pilot who mistakenly bombed an Iraqi madrassa, killing innocent students.

Dr. Glenn O. Gabbard, professor of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, author of “The Psychology of the Sopranos” and “Psychiatry and the Cinema.”

Nobel Laureate James Watson set off a fury when he questioned whether Africans have the same intelligence as Caucasians.

So did journalist William Saletan, who defended Watson in a recent three-part series on race and IQ for Slate magazine, and highlighted research championed by white supremacists.

Saletan has apologized. But discomforting questions remain in the air.

We’ve invited three authorities in the field to help us understand what the science does — and does not — tell us, and hear why they believe all brains are created equal.

This hour, On Point: a scientific look at race and IQ.

-James Hattori

Guests:

Richard Nisbett, Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan. He wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times titled “All Brains Are the Same Color.”

James Flynn, Professor Emeritus of Political Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is best known for discovering the Flynn Effect — the rise in IQ test scores over time around the world. He is author of the new book “What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect.”

Eric Turkheimer, Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia. He completed a major study in 2003 looking at class and IQ.

Nobody’s perfect, but perfectionism is a virtue — right? Great athletes, star CEOs, and Nobel laureates embody it. But where does the perfectionist tendency lead? Great success for some — but then there are the crazy bosses, pushy parents, and high-striving students on the edge of a breakdown.

New research on perfectionism reveals that the urge to get things just right can go too far. It’s linked with compulsive behavior, eating disorders, and depression. The perfect, it turns out, really is the enemy of the good — or, at least, of good health.

This hour, On Point: perfectionism and mental health.

-Jacki Lyden

Guests:

Gordon Flett, professor of psychology and associate dean at York University in Toronto, he is author of “Perfectionism: Theory, Research and Treatment.”

Heather Thompson-Brenner, clinical research professor of pyschology at Boston University, she is a program director at BU’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

They say love changes everything. But time changes love.

Just how much it can change became front page news last week, when the family of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor revealed that her husband had fallen in love with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient.

And she was happy for him.

What happens to the part of ourselves that loves as the mind ages, and changes?

Our culture celebrates young love. But mature love is filled with passion too, even as our memories leave us. Seniors living for the moment – not the past.

This hour On Point: how we love when we grow old.

-Jacki Lyden

Guests:

Robin Dessel, director of special care services at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in New York.

Dr. Gary Small, professor of psychiatry and behavorial sciences and director of the Center on Aging at UCLA.

Anne Basting, director of the Center on Age and Community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Human beings are nothing if not emotional animals. Jerome Kagan, one of the country’s most prominent psychologists, has spent a lifetime untangling the complexities of our brains.

Now he’s out with a fascinating new book looking at our emotions: What’s hard wired and what’s not; how gender, age, religion, nationality and class all affect our interactions with each other; how we respond to risk, how we live our lives. It’s a deep, illuminating picture of what goes on inside our heads.

This hour, On Point: Jerome Kagan and what our feelings are made of.

-Bob Oakes

Guest:

Jerome Kagan, professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard University, where he served as director of the Mind/Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. His new book is “What is Emotion?”.

Elyn Saks is a powerhouse high achiever by anyone’s measure. Top of her class at Vanderbilt, Oxford-trained, a Yale Law grad, and now a high-profile law professor at USC.

Elyn Saks is also a full-blown schizophrenic, a brilliant veteran of — her word — madness.

For years she hid it, even from family and friends. Now she’s talking about the voices in her head, the suicidal fantasies, the imaginary fears, the hospitalizations and leather restraining belts.

It’s a rare firsthand account of a life lived in full through a minefield of psychosis.

This hour, On Point: Elyn Saks, schizophrenic — and very much alive in the world.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Elyn Saks, diagnosed schizophrenic, law professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, and author of “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”

Dr. Stephen Behnke, clinical psychologist and attorney, longtime friend of Elyn Saks, and director of ethics at the American Psychological Society.

Dr. Thomas Smith, psychiatrist, medical director at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and associate professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center.

Six years tomorrow. Six years since 9/11.

It’s getting to be a long time. Maybe now it’s time to look at where we’ve been. If Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation in one direction, 9/11 galvanized it in many. Pro-war, anti-war, right, left, and scattered center.

Politicians and pundits have analyzed how and why. Now the psychologists are stepping in — and focusing on the impact of fear. Research finds the mere mention of death changes minds. The image of the Twin Towers exploding is a psychological supernova.

This hour On Point: where our minds have been since 9/11.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College and co-author of “In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror.”

Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, author of “The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior — and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage.”

Graham Allison, professor of government and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, author of “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.”

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that began on the humble squid shows that the very act of reading itself actually shapes the human brain. And reading has shaped our history, our culture, our civilization.

Now, in the digital age, we are reading less. She sees devolution.

This hour On Point: reading, Proust and the squid.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”

Constance Steinkuehler, professor of educational communication and technology, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.