THE BOB EDWARDS SHOW, March 5-9, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012: It’s been ten years since President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. The education reform bill had lofty goals but have public schools met them in the last decade? John Merrow is the Education Correspondent for PBS’s NewsHour and President of Learning Matters. He joins Bob to discuss the state of public education. Then, if you listened to music in the 1960s and 1970s then you listened to the Wrecking Crew, the uncredited studio musicians who performed on one hit record after another, for everyone from the Beach Boys to the Byrds to Simon & Garfunkel to the Mamas & the Papas. Kent Hartman tells the story of these talented session musicians in his book The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012: Clay Johnson is the founder of Blue State Digital which built and managed Barack Obama’s online presidential campaign. Now Johnson says we not only suffer from information overload, but we have lost the ability to filter the average eleven hours of data we ingest every day. He describes the problem and offers some advice in a new book, The Information Diet: a Case for Conscious Consumption.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012: The Life Of Super-Earths is a detailed tour of current efforts to answer the age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, the founding director of Harvard University’s Origins of Life Initiative, takes us on a hunt for habitable planets and alien life forms. This search is feeding directly into synthetic biology—the effort to build new forms of life—making it more likely that we will first discover truly “alien” life forms in a lab right here on Earth. Then, Bob talks with veteran folk musician Jonathan Edwards about his first studio recording in 14 years. The album is titled My Love Will Keep.
Thursday, March 8, 2012: It’s hard to classify the music group Time for Three. Classically trained but sharing a love for all kinds of music, Zach De Pue (violin), Nick Kendall (violin), and Ranaan Meyer (double bass) play a blend of classical, gypsy, indie, country western and jazz to create a sound that is uniquely their own. This group on-the-rise makes their debut tonight at Carnegie Hall.
Friday, March 9, 2012: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, travel writer Pico Iyer crosses the globe in this very personal exploration of his similarities and life-time connection with writer Graham Greene. Iyer’s book is titled The Man Within My Head. Then, in this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Michael Taylor. In an age of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, many people behave like they are the stars of their own reality TV shows, often imitating the actions of pop culture celebrities. Taylor doesn’t look for role models on TV or the movies. His heroine is his mother, who never gave an inch in the face of life’s unforgiving challenges.