Is this man really dangerous or just crazy?

The American experience is filled with demagogues who are often brought on by tough economic times and periods of dramatic change. Fear mongering has long been a stable of our politics and our culture. Father Coughlin, Joseph  McCarthy, Huey Long, the populist James Curely, Robert Depugh and the Minute Men of the 1960’s and the John Birth Society; all tried to ride waves of fear and populist anger and in the end all failed. Today a new name has been added to this motley pantheon. One that not surprising comes out of  Fox News, talk radio and the worst of therapeutic culture. He is Glenn Beck and while unfortunately, like "Lord Valdemort," it gives him power just to speak his name, it’s important that we understand this modern day phenomenon.  I had the experience of meeting and listening to Glenn Beck this past Saturday, and since then having been trying to figure out if I had witnessed, a kind of right wing Oprah, Hitler or Howard Beal,or Joe McCarthy.

Dana Milbank, syndicated columnist with the Washington Post, tries to sort all of this out in his new book about Beck, Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America.

My conversation with Dana Milbank:

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Will we be swallowed up by a black hole?

It is the largest machine ever built by man. It is 16.5 miles long, housed in a circular tunnel 300 feet below the ground. It is the the coldest place in the universe, one degree lower than the temperature of outer space. It is engaged in what is perhaps the most anticipated experiments in the history of science. It is the Large Hadron Collider and physical science will never the name after it peers far deeper into the universe than ever before. Some think, as Dan Brown's story told us, it will swallow us up in a Black Hole. More likely it will change forever the way we see the world. Award winning science writer Amir Aczel, in his new book, Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider takes us on a unique visit deep inside the LHC and tells the story of how it works and how it came to be.

My conversation with Amir Aczel:

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Waiting for SUPERMAN

Most of you have seen or at least heard about the movie "Waiting for Superman." The award winning documentary, has now spawned a book. A series of essays by cutting edge educational thinkers exploring reforms and how to fix our broken public school system.

One of the most astute of these analyses is Jay Mathews, the education columnist for The Washington Post. In the film and in his essay he argues that successful schools begin not with parents, or academic theories, or new building, but with great teachers.

My conversation with Jay Matthews about the movie and the book Waiting for "SUPERMAN": How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools.

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The Founding Father

We are currently in a season embroiled in partisan politics. As such, it's more important than ever to understand our Republic and its historical antecedents

There is no place to better begin this journey then to look at our first President, George Washington. While much as been written about Washington, and many myths have emerged over the centuries, perhaps the real George Washington has yet to emerge. Award winning historian Ron Chernow in his new biography Washington: A Life, takes us though the formative events of America's founding based on fact, not mythology.

My conversation with Ron Chernow:

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Dreaming in Chinese

For most us when we think about China, it's in the context of 1.3 billion Chinese people as a kind of monolithic nation and culture. We see a growing international power, a competitor and a confusing, almost alien landscape. Perhaps because its culture and language is so different, the only way for a Westerner to try understand it, is from the inside, to be a part of it and not outside looking in.

That is precisely what Deborah Fallows did during her three years living in China with her husband, the distinguished journalist James Fallows. Deborah has written a story that is part memoir, part travelogue, part psychological profile.  Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language should be required reading for anyone visiting or doing business with China.

My conversation with Deborah Fallows:

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Washington's Scandal Culture

The history of muckraking journalism is very much the history of America. Our founders clearly understood the importance of a free press in a free society. Often times though, the work of the press has not served the interests of those in power and we’ve seen powerful push back as that power is threatened. We all remember The Pentagon Papers, the work of Sinclair Lewis, Walter Winchell, Woodward and Bernstein and today Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Back in the days of Richard Nixon, another powerful newspaperman, Jack Anderson, would seek to tear down the wall of censorship that surrounded the Nixon administration. As you might expect, Nixon sought to retaliate and in so doing was born new chapters in the scandal culture of Washington. University of Maryland Professor and award winning journalist Mark Feldstein takes us inside a conflict that defined modern political warfare in his book Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture.


My conversation with Mark Feldstein:

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Badasses

Football today is big business. But back in the 1970's there were a group of guys that were a combination of castoffs, psychos and geniuses. Newcomers were from schools no one ever heard of and veterans had been cast off by every other "respectable" team. This group was the Oakland Raiders. John Madden was their neurotic and brilliant coach, Al Davis was their eccentric and imperious owner. They were like no other team at the time, and certainly like nothing we see today. Journalist Peter Richmond tells their story in Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders.

My conversation with Peter Richmond:

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In Praise of Adoption

The subject of adoption has, for too long, been something we've had trouble talking about. While the rate of adoption has been declining here, the acceptance of family diversity has been on the rise. International adoptions are transforming American families, and yet special challenges abound.

NPR's Scott Simon has written a powerful new book on the subject of adoptions. Part memoir, part love story, part public policy treatise, Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption is a gift to the 1.5 million adoped childen in the U.S. whose bond with their adopted parents is ever bit as powerful as those with birth parents.

My conversation with Scott Simon:

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The Christian Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

In his previous book The Family, Jeff Sharlet examined a powerful, secretive group in Washington, D.C spawning a new kind of unaccountable and elitist fundamentalism. Now, in his new book C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy,  Sharlet investigates and writes about a group of Republican politicians who are affiliated with the The Family. They are some of the most powerful members of Congress and they have, until recently, been cloaked in respectability. This group, driven by moral corruption and piety, represents a kind of fundamentalism on steroids that they are trying to use to reshape American politics, the military and foreign policy; all without any democratic accountability.

My conversation with Jeff Sharlet:

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Money and the Decline of American Leadership

Clearly America's role in the world is changing. The American Century, declared by Henry Luce, seventy years ago, may have long since reached its apex. Many view this as a positive sign of humility and a refreshing lack of nationalistic hubris. We also hear much about our growing national debt, caused in large measure by the military expansionism of the past 9 years. Remember, Bill Clinton left us with a surplus back in 2000.

The question now is how are these two ideas related. How is American foreign policy and our role in the world, being shaped or influenced by our economic limitations and is that a good or a bad development?  In his latest work, The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, Professor Michael Mandelbaum, one of our most astute foreign policy thinkers, takes on these dual questions and what they mean for the future of global leadership.

My conversation with Michael Mandelbaum:

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America's Great Migration

Every so often a books comes along that reminds us of why narrative history matters. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson has given us such a book in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She gives us a deeply personal tale of one of the great underreported stories of the 20th century: the migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North, West and Midwest. To understand this story is to finally come to grips with race, power, politics, religion and class in our contemporary society.

My conversation with Isabel Wilkerson:

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Somebody Else's Century

T.S. Eliot wrote that "we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began...and know that place again for the first time."

And so it is that in this new century as we are compelled to interact more with the East, with China, with Japan and with India, perhaps it will better enable us to understand our own limitations and see ourselves in a global rather than a provincial context. In so doing, we might also redefine both the importance of history, coupled with our ongoing urge to be modern. Author and journalist Patrick Smith in his new work Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World, delves with extraordinary depth, into what it means to maintain ones true and unique identity and culture, amidst the onslaught of Western modernity.

My conversation with Patrick Smith:

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Share and Share Alike

From our earliest days of pre-school and kindergarten, we learn the importance of sharing. Yet somehow, along the way, sharing is replaced by "mine." Ownership and consumption finally rule the day. Even through our recent period of hyper-consumption, we still checked books out of the library, we rented video, used Netflix and shopped on Ebay. Arguably, all of these things are forerunners of a whole new collaborative way of looking at our culture.

Former Clinton Foundation board member and Oxford and Harvard educated consultant Rachel Botsman, in her book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, looks at revolutions in what she calls Collaborate Consumption.

My conversation with Rachel Botsman:

Designer Genes

Last week, on the program, we talked about the ability to sequence your own genome and what that might mean for the future understanding of our own health. Now we are going to look further into the future, at how cutting edge genetic science may literally allow us to speed up and transform our own evolution. In a matter of just a few years we may be able to improve ourselves and our children, duplicate ourselves, improve our genes, in short, to personally guide our genetic destiny.

However this does not come without serious ethical, moral and cultural choices. What was once the realm of science fiction, now must be a real part of our national debate. Dr. Steven Potter, in his new book Designer Genes: A New Era in the Evolution of Man, takes us to the outer limits of that debate and what might soon be possible.

My conversation with Steven Potter:

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Your Genome for a $1000

Imagine the possibility of having a complete picture of your genes. You would know any predisposition for disease, drugs could be created for you and you alone. Your unique genome would be a part of your medical records, just like your blood pressure or cholesterol level. And what if you could do all of this for $1,000 or less?

This is the brave new world that could be just around the corner. But like any advance in medicine it comes with its own set of side effects. Some medical, some ethical and some psychological. Science writer Dr. Kevin Davies takes us deep into this new era of personalized medicine in his new book The $1,000 Genome: The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine.

My conversation with Kevin Davies:

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Why is there something?

It's one of the most fundamental, yet controversial questions of our time, or of any time. How did the universe begin? Where did the universe come from and what are the laws of nature that govern the universe? The worlds most esteemed physicist, Stephen Hawking once said that "if we understood all the forces that created the universe, we'd understand the mind of God."

Now Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow have changed that view. They believe that the universe could indeed have created itself from nothing and that surely means that perhaps other universes were formed before the Big Bang and that others still exist.  All of this mind bending physics is the essence of a new book by Mlodinow and Hawking, The Grand Design.

My conversation with Leonard Mlodinow:

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Why Margaret Thatcher matters

The US has long shared a very special and sometimes symbiotic relationship with Great Britain. Tony Blair, in his new memoir, talks of his close personal relationship with Bill Clinton and his more macabre relationship with George W. Bush. In the 1980's, the policies of US were in fact, shaped in some measure by the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan's infatuation with Thatcher and her ideas, would shape the US and the world for years to come. Margaret Thatcher was both a pivotal and polarizing leader. She inherited a country that was severely broken and reshaped it in her image. Claire Berlinski, in her new biography, There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, gives us an insightful portrait of Thatcher, her ideas, and her influence.

My conversation with Claire Berlinski:

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Truth, the whole truth and nothing but....

The brilliance of language is that it both enables us to communicate effortlessness, transport ideas and create poetry. Yet at the same time it can be used for the bassist kind of lies and deception. How do we know which is which and when we are bing lied to as well as when we create our own "tangled web?" Truth detection expert Pamela Meyer, in her new book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, gives us a chance to change the odds in our favor, in our pursuit of truth.

My conversation with Pamela Meyer:

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