HOUR ONE
American artist Chuck Close is a master of highly detailed, larger-than-life portraits that bring out his subjects’ intellectual depth. Writer and personal friend Christopher Finch’s biography Chuck Close: Life takes readers through Close’s art student days in Seattle to his professional success with critics and the public alike. In 1988, Close suffered a spinal artery collapse, leaving him wheelchair bound but still painting. In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Close with the National Medal of Arts.
Bob talks with Edge of Sports host Dave Zirin about his new book, Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love. Zirin says the people who are supposed to be the stewards of professional sports are instead overly obsessed with squeezing every last dollar from fans – to the point that many fans are now alienated from the teams they grew up loving.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with curator Dan Gediman about the essay of Swedish economist and diplomat Dag Hammarskjold. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, serving from 1953 – 1961. He worked to ease tensions between Israel and Arab nations, and to defuse the Suez crisis. Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash in Zambia in 1961.
HOUR TWO
Our series No Place Like Home continues, this hour focusing on the environmental and economic importance of the wetlands of coastal Louisiana. Those swamps and marshes have been receding for decades now and big events like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill speed their destruction. First Bob talks with Denise Reed on the back porch of her home in Montegut, Louisiana. She’s an expert on the formation and degradation of wetlands. Then we take a boat ride with musician Tab Benoit. He’s from Houma, Louisiana and takes us to see a healthy swamp and then one killed by salt water intrusion. Benoit is the founder of the non-profit organization Voice of the Wetlands.