Bob Edwards Weekend, March 31 – April 1, 2012
HOUR ONE:
Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.
David Unger is an editorial writer at The New York Times where he’s covered foreign policy, international economics, and the military for more than three decades. He’s been on the editorial board for 22 years and now has written a book called The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs.
We remember singer-songwriter Eric Lowen. In 2006, Bob talked with Lowen and his musical partner Dan Navarro. The two met as singing waiters and wrote Pat Benatar’s smash hit “We Belong.” In 2004, Lowen was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Lowen died on March 23 at the age of 60.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Fred D’Aguiar. There are some things we do that have no purpose beyond bringing joy. Dance is one of those things. D’Aguiar is a poet, and a dancer. He says that dance is also magical and curative. D’Aguiar’s multicutural childhood, spread over two continents, taught his body to move in unique ways that inspire him to this day.
HOUR TWO:
Bob talks with Jeff Forshaw and Brian Cox. Forshaw is a theoretical physics professor and Cox is a professor of particle physics and host of the Discovery Channel series Wonders of the Universe. They have co-authored The Quantum Universe, which is a follow up their best-selling book Why Does E=mc2. In their latest book, Forshaw and Cox explain quantum mechanics and why it matters in everyday life.
Humans have a natural desire to live with others, not alone. But Eric Klinenberg argues that during the past half century, our species has undergone a remarkable social experiment. For the first time in all of human history, vast numbers of people are living alone. In 1950, only 22 percent of Americans were single. Today, more than 50 percent are unmarried and 31 million adults live alone. Klinenberg explores what this means for our society in his new book Going Solo.
Bob Edwards Weekend is heard on Sirius XM Public Radio (XM 121, Sirius 205) on Saturdays from 8-10 AM EST.
Visit Bob Edwards Weekend on PRI’s website to find local stations that air the program.
The idea that Unger advances–that we've become less free as a country over the last 70 or 100 years, except for the asterisk of people who aren't white and male and heterosexual and Protestant–is breathtaking in so blithely skipping past that asterisk. Check your privilege, Mr. Unger! To minimise the advances in civil rights during that time–for women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and even for freethinkers and political radicals–because it inconveniently undermines the purity of his argument, is really indefensible and destroys his credibility. I'm sure he has valid concerns to convey, but the way he framed it made me utterly uninterested in reading his book or giving him any more of a hearing.