Forthcoming on The Bob Edwards Show (March 3-7, 2014)

The Bob Edwards Show, March 3-7, 2014

 

Monday, March 3, 2014:  Bob talks to Mary Willingham, a former academic advisor to athletes at the University of North Carolina, and UNC history professor Jay Smith, about the continuing controversy around the university’s big money sports program. Willingham says that some of the football and basketball players at Carolina she tutored or evaluated were reading between a 4^th grade and 8^th grade level, and a that a handful were functionally illiterate. She said one of the Tar Heels’ basketball players she tutored couldn’t read at all.  UNC officials have accused her of making this up, and demoted her. She’s also received death threats from fans. Willingham and professor Jay Smith are writing a book about the scandal, and the university’s reaction. Then, comedian/performance artist Mark Malkoff talks about going for a week without his smartphone. He had to find creative, low-tech substitutes for daily activities like texting, status updates on Facebook, and posting silly pictures of his cat on Instagram. Malkoff’s previous stunts have included racing a NY city bus on a kids’ Big Wheel tricycle (the Big Wheel won,) visiting all 171 Starbucks in New York city within 24 hours, and consuming something at each one; and living for a week in an IKEA while his apartment was being fumigated.  

 

Tuesday, March 4, 2014: Zelda Sayre was the wife and literary muse of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Together they were the living symbols of The Jazz Age, the Roaring 20’s and the Lost Generation. But Zelda was also a writer, dancer, painter and so much more. In her novel, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, written from Zelda’s point of view, Therese Anne Fowler gives Zelda her due. Then, Bob talks with brothers Jonathan and Tad Richards about their book titled Nick & Jake. In the epistolary novel, the two famous literary characters, Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes, refugees from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, strike up a correspondence and then friendship. The story charts their romp through 1950s America with a bizarre cast of fictional characters and actual historical figures. Their book has just been released in paperback.

 

Wednesday, March 5, 2014:  Margaret Fuller was one of the literary elite of 19th Century New England, along with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But many of the details of her remarkable life have been eclipsed by her tragic death, in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island. A new biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, by Megan Marshall, tells her story from youth in New England to adulthood in New York and Europe. Fuller was a literary editor, a columnist crusading on behalf of the poor and a war correspondent. Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and the New York Times Book Review.

 

Thursday, March 6, 2014:  Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier’s book on “datafication”- an emerging science that tracks the movements of people, inventory, …and can even predict the spread of disease. Co-author and Economist data editor Kenneth Cukier joins Bob to discuss the book. It’s now out in paperback. Then, Paul Schomer of Radio Crowd Fund is back again to share some new music.

 

Friday, March 7, 2014:  Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.  Next, following World War II, the United States secretly brought over a number of former Nazi scientists, notwithstanding their crimes against humanity. Best-selling author Annie Jacobsen details this covert plan in her new book Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America.