NPR Program Highlights

October 6-12, 2002

All Things Reconsidered. Daily afternoon news and interviews, hosted by Robert Siegel. 

This week: Today's Supreme Court -- Robed Dinosaurs or the Reactionary
  Cutting Edge?
Monday: Nina Totenberg’s decidedly hostile interview with Supreme Court  
  Justice Clarence Thomas.
Wednesday: Nina Totenberg’s decidedly hostile interview with Supreme Court 
  Justice Antonin Scalia.
Thursday: Part One of Nina Totenberg’s worshipful, puff-piece interview with 
  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Friday: Parts Two and Three of Nina Totenberg’s worshipful, puff-piece interview
  with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


Car Talk. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, "Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers," dole out car-repair tips plus huge dollops of uninformed psychiatric advice to callers with their trademark charming-soon-to-become-annoying jabber and loud guffaws that nearly demonstrates NPR can be as blue-collar as the next radio network. 

Saturday: “Car Talk -- Best of the Decade.” Tom and Ray revisit their zaniest moments, including never-before broadcast call-ins from a psychotic phone stalker named Carla.

Color Me Diverse. A new program featuring biographies of famous and not-so-famous mixed-race/ethnicity individuals who most typify the melted hodgepodge that is what America was, is and should be all about.  

Premier broadcast features Tiger Wood, Halle Berry and Mel Gibson. With a special tribute to Wayne Newton.  


Fresh Air. Award-winning magazine of contemporary arts and issues hosted by Terry Gross. 

Tuesday -- Thursday: Terry's first in-depth interview with herself. Employing her characteristically gentle, yet probing interview style, Terry pulls revealing answers from the darkest depths of her very soul that prove to be far more shocking to her than they are to her fans.


Latino USA. NPR diversity diva Maria Hinojosa hosts this Hispanic news and culture hour. A show for and about Latinos and Latinas -- the sorrow, pain and triumphs of life straddled between two cultures and the search for identity and acceptance in the dominant, patriarchal Anglo culture while struggling to retain their patriarchal Hispanic heritage, over and over, again and again, week after week -- as if it's so unique and different from the experiences of every other ethnic group -- blah blah blah...   

This week: Maria interviews documentary maker Maria Santa Maria Zapatista about her latest film on the women of the East L.A. Barrio's quilting-bee rodeos, Today We Quilt, Tomorrow We Remember..


Living On Earth.  Host Steve Curwood looks at our beautiful blue planet and the filthy human scum that despoil it. With in-depth interviews and deep commentary examining the interaction between Gaia's fragile-as-glass environment and the heavy jackboot print left by humanity. 

Steve interviews National Resources Defense Council environmental psychiatrist Abbie Leafy, producer of the award-winning documentary short, When They Came Back to Crawford. Abbie discusses the reappearance of bald eagles and other endangered wildlife around Crawford, Texas, the home of President Bush, since he moved to Washington, D.C. and has had less time to hunt on his ranch.  


Morning Edition. Morning news. Over two decades on the air. Hosted by folksy news guy, Bob Edwards.

Bob interviews advertising-industry rebel and self-promoting bloatbag, Gerry Dulla Femina, author of the bestseller: Straight Men Are Always Doltish and Women Always Aren’t -- Why the gender marketers have finally got it right. 

Radio Expeditions goes to Montana to chat with dinosaur entrepreneur and sometime-paleontologist Jack Horner about his latest theory on the social life of teenage dinosaurs and the fossil evidence that suggests they herded together, shunned the smarter ones, mumbled vocalizations and slouched. 


Says You!, A game show that brings together six Algonquin round-table wannabes with host/producer Richard Sher. Think stuffy trivia and clever word games with a more than modest pinch of pretension, all in front of a live audience prone to chuckling knowingly.


Selected Shorts. Matches award-winning actors of stage and screen with their favorite underwear.  

Saturday: Special celebrity edition. Ozzy Osbourne, Bill Clinton, Anne Coulter, Janet Reno, P. J. O'Rourke, Gloria Steinem, Madeline Albright and Madonna bring their favorite briefs to the studio and describe them in detail.


Talk of the Nation. Real-smart and very congenial host Neal Conan provokes much deep thought as he explores today's most topical, controversial issues.  

Wednesday: Interview with Nobel-prize winning Indian peace-activist and social-engineer, Sanjiv Rashood, author of: Next Stop: Utopia; One Team, 7 Billion Players and the recent bestseller, Cajun Punjabi of Colour – Stranger in a Familiar Land. 

Talk of the Nation - Science Friday.  Resident brainiac and very congenial host Ira Flatow presides over discussions of the latest developments in science and technology.  

Can Lint Feed the World? -- Prof. Irwin Clot says, "You bet!" as he discusses his recent discovery that common dryer lint can be synthesized into food. He argues that Americans dispose of enough of the fluffy stuff each day to make highly nutritious cellulose-fiber wafers to feed all of Sub-Saharan Africa, plus a bonus nation in Asia, for a year. 

The Moon: Ours to Relish - or Ravish? -- We've only been there six times, but footprints, astronaut droppings and rocket boosters litter the lunar landscape. Space-ecology activist Igor Plasmat, who says, "When we return to the Moon, it will be our responsibility to preserve our only natural satellite's pristine state," debates Cato Institute libertarian thinker Jeremy Extracta, who argues, "Bottom line: Anything we do could only improve this radiation-ravaged rock pile that makes a West Virginia strip mine look like Yellowstone." 


This Campy American Life. Every week Ira Glass chronicles in his thematic, and more than slightly condescending audio documents, the flaming irony that hides behind the thin veil we call everyday life.

Saturday's show topic: Some of My Best Friends Wear Tights.

-Catholic Schoolgirls Who Don’t Smoke – The secret life of geeky girls.
-The Heartbreak of Trailer-Park Ballet by Sarah Vowell
-Superman, Batman & Spiderman wear tights. Any questions? – David Sedaris.
-Ira visits The Museum of Shakespeare’s Tights in Cockburn, Ohio.

Weekend Edition Saturday. Host Scott Simon offers news, analysis and uncontrolled sighing-on-the-verge-of-weeping  as he feels the pain of his weekly guests.

This week: Inuit folk songstress Dawn Colestra chats with Scott about her wild childhood on a free-range sea lion ranch in Nunavit and her recent journey south to the source of the Mississippi to jam with 110-year-old Minnesota blues man Soren “Albino Boy” Andersen and Mandan klezmer king Johnny Desoto.

Weekend Edition Sunday. Liane Hansen brings news, analysis and features.  With New York Times' puzzle dweebster Will Shortz's maddeningly cryptic word riddles that could only be derived from his very private little world.

On this week's show, Liane talks to Laura Starch, author of Pretty Plain -- a collection of brutally frank interviews with 25 slightly south-of-photogenic public-radio hosts that reveals their bitter struggle to break the video glass ceiling that is television.

World Radio Network. Offers an international perspective that turns out to be only a slightly different British one as the BBC reports on world news from the point of view of a faded 19th-century imperialist power. Hard global news tempered with brevity-challenged human-interest stories ranging from the quietly curious to the spectacularly soporific. 

Monday: A special look at the ladies' sweater-collector clubs of East Utterswich.

Wednesday: Patience pays off: Live coverage of the triumphant culmination of the century-long, multi-generational pursuit of the elusive European sparrow known as the dotted quiffer by U.K. birdwatchers as they bag their long-awaited prize.

Thursday: Another killer asteroid menaces Earth -- or maybe not.