Hello, Hubsters
Well, the last month or so has been a little off-center, what with music fests, conventions, strange schedules, and a vacation after the big political tent shows. This Monday, things finally return to normal, and it looks as if we have some fantastic episodes ahead of us. I’m particularly excited about two of Stephen’s guests, but more on that later.
Much has happened in the past few days, and as usual, Stephen and Jon will have plenty of material at their disposal. There’s a lot I could go into, because certainly everyone here knows my political perspective, and Romney has had a plethora of foot-in-mouth incidents recently. However, this time I will not dwell on Romney and the day-to-day battle for the White House. Instead, I prefer to take a moment of silence in memory of those who lost their lives in the US Embassy in Libya, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. (Read this wonderful New York Times tribute to Stevens.) September 11th seems to me a cursed day and it proved so once again this year. I know that tragedy is not generally comedians’ stock in trade, but I am certain both Stephen and Jon will find an appropriate way to address this sorrowful occasion.
As Stephen said this past week at his talk with Friar James Martin: “If someone spreads hate… then they’re not your religious leader.” Would that the world were as gentle and sensible and logical as Stephen. It would be a better place.
I’d like to wish all my Jewish readers L’shana tova, or a Happy New Year. Yes, it’s Rosh Hashanah. Can the atone phone be far away?
Monday, 9/17: Drew Faust
Drew Faust, the Virginia-born president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History, has a special interest: the Civil War and the American South. That alone makes me look forward to her visit, because as we know, it’s a subject that engages Stephen, too. Her book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, examines the huge loss of life during that brother-against-brother conflict. More than 600,000 soldiers perished—which the summary on the publisher’s page says would be equivalent to six million in proportion to today’s population—and that doesn’t even take into account the numbers of seriously maimed. Faust explores how this carnage affected and altered our entire nation, and she weaves first-person accounts from people of all walks of life through her discussion. Faust won numerous awards and praise for this work, including the Bancroft Prize and a mention as a New York Times Best Book; it also was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Although Republic of Suffering was published in 2008, it’s the inspiration for an episode of PBS’s American Experience, “Death and the Civil War,” which will air September 18th.
Before assuming the presidency of Harvard, Faust was founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her prior books all focus on the South, as well. They include Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War and Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War.
Visit Drew Faust’s Harvard website.
Harvard recently had a big cheating scandal and Faust addressed it.
Forbes listed her as #84 among the 100 most powerful women. And, in an article in the same magazine, she offered students career advice.
When she became head of the once all-male Harvard—the first woman to hold that job–the New York Times profiled her. It says she marched in the civil rights protests of the 1960s; maybe she was near Stephen’s pregnant mom, carrying her boy in his first march?
Watch her commencement address at Harvard this year. And then you can read her beginning of year message for this fall semester.
Read an interview with Faust in which she discusses our fascination with war.
Tuesday, 9/18: Jeffrey Toobin
New Yorker writer and CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin has always focused on legal issues. His most famous work, the acclaimed and award-winning The Nine, closely examined the justices of the Supreme Court. Now he returns to the Supremes, but with a different slant. His new book, which comes out the very day of his TCR appearance, is The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. Toobin specifically zooms in on the diametrically opposed philosophies of President Obama and Chief Justice John Roberts. The synopsis provided by the publisher (which the link above leads to) states the problem interestingly and succinctly: “Both men are young, brilliant, charismatic, charming, determined to change the course of the nation—and completely at odds on almost every major constitutional issue. One is radical; one essentially conservative. The surprise is that Obama is the conservative…” The title alludes to—or at least, partially alludes to—the fact that Roberts bungled the wording when he administered Obama’s oath of office on inauguration day.
Toobin comes by his journalist bent genetically, as his mother, Marlene Sanders, was a well-known correspondent for both ABC and CBS, while his father, Jerome Toobin worked as a news producer. Although he did some sports reporting as an undergraduate, he shifted gears and became editor of the Harvard Law Review while getting his law degree from that same university. Toobin worked as an attorney for several years before moving to the New Yorker and ABC News and he’s won an Emmy® for his reporting.
Follow Toobin on Twitter.
Here’s his New Yorker page.
Read his bio at CNN.com.
For all his inside knowledge of the Supreme Court, Toobin thought that the justices would strike down Obamacare. They didn’t, and he admitted that he got it wrong.
He just did an interview with the Star Tribune about The Oath.
Toobin has been on The Colbert Report several times before, usually not as the main guest, but as a legal analyst when a major Supreme Court decision is in the offing. He came on to discuss the Obamacare ruling; Citizens United; and Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination.
Here’s what Toobin had to say about Akin, the “legitimate rape” comment, and abortion. A clear-eyed perspective beyond the obvious.
Wednesday, 9/19: Itzhak Perlman
Here comes part one of the guests I’m super-excited about in this fantastic week of people. Impish and fun, Israeli-born violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman is always delightful and one of the clearest, most appealing proselytizers of classical music. And just in time for the Jewish holidays he has a new and somewhat unusual recording: rather than Bach or Beethoven or Mozart or Mendelssohn, Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul, features Jewish liturgical music and showcases the singing of Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot. (For those who do not know, a cantor accompanies the rabbi, singing the prayers in a synagogue.) On Perlman’s site, he describes it as “beloved liturgical and traditional Jewish works in new arrangements backed by chamber orchestra and klezmer musicians.” This is, by the way, Ashkenazy religious music; the music of the Jews from Eastern Europe, rather than the Sephardic or Arab/Spanish Jews, which sounds quite different.
Perlman, who contracted polio as a child and uses either a brace and crutches to walk or a scooter at this point, first trained at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv. He then came to New York, where he had a much-coveted appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and continued his studies at Julliard. He has gone on to play with virtually every major orchestra in the world; won the Kennedy Center Honor, the Medal of Liberty, and the National Medal of Arts, as well as four Emmys® and 15 Grammys® (including a lifetime one); and performed at Obama’s inauguration festivities. Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Roosevelt, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Yeshiva, and Hebrew Universities have all bestowed him with honorary degrees. You can also hear Perlman on the soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust-themed film, Schindler’s List. He now teaches at his alma mater, Julliard, and also runs his own summer program for budding musicians. In addition to violin, he now regularly steps up to the podium to conduct.
The discography section on his website has links to buy all his CDs.
Read an interview about the album in the Jewish Press.
Read a review of Eternal Echoes in Opera Today.
Like him on Facebook.
Visit his YouTube channel.
Watch a video of Perlman and Cantor Helfgot performing music from the new album.
He just closed the Hollywood Bowl classical season. Read a review of his performance..
Perlman appeared on PBS’s Great Performances, on the art of the violin .
The rumor that won’t go away: That he once finished a concert with a broken string. Snopes debunks this myth.
Watch this video of him performing at the White House in honor of Israeli president Shimon Peres. Gee, wouldn’t it be fun to have your favorite artists come to your home to perform? If I were president, I’d have an evening-length show hosted by Stephen, and featuring David Hallberg, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Patrick Stewart and Alan Rickman doing some dialogue.
Perlman appeared on Charlie Rose and on NPR.
Thursday, 9/20: Errol Morris
Part two of the super-excitement for me: Welcome one of my favorite documentary filmmakers to the Report! If you have not seen Errol Morris’s brilliant, groundbreaking The Thin Blue Line, get thee to Netflix or to anywhere you can find a copy. In it, Morris, a former private investigator, examines the facts behind a man’s murder conviction—and ultimately gathers enough evidence to have him exonerated and released. It’s compelling and totally original. Another favorite of mine is Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, in which Morris profiles four very different men: one who does animal topiary; another who studies the blind, hairless mole rat; a lion tamer, and an robotics scientist who was developing small robots to explore outer space (it’s from him that the film’s title came). If you wonder how a coherent film can result from this wildly varying quartet, trust me—it can. It’s simply a stunning look at humans, nature, and our attempts to know and control the universe beyond us.
One of Morris’s inventions, and one that affects the very soul of his works, is the “interrotron.” It enables the person interviewed—and Morris almost always conducts multiple interviews in his works—to face him directly while also looking straight into the camera. It creates an intimacy, a bond, a rapport between the two that could never exist without that close interaction. The resulting films have won numerous awards, including an Oscar® for Fog of War, in which Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, offered a brutally frank assessment of the huge mistakes he made in Vietnam. Another highly disturbing work, Mr. Death, looks at Fred Leuchter, Jr., who invented some of the devices used to administer the death penalty in American prisons; he’s also a Holocaust denier and Morris accompanies him as he tries to make his case. I must point out that Morris does NOT accept the denial, and finds it horrific. But it speaks to his interest in notions of truth and lies, facts and falsehoods, knowing and unknowability, and it’s chilling.
But Morris isn’t actually visiting Stephen to discuss his films, because his newest work is a book—although it follows the same path as his documentaries. A Wilderness of Errors: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, once again explores a man’s conviction for murder. MacDonald was judged guilty of killing his pregnant wife and daughters, a horrific crime he has always denied doing. He instead claimed that a group of hippies high on drugs committed the murders; this all happened in the wake of the infamous Manson massacre, where a cult undeniably caused the bloodbath. Here, MacDonald’s explanation did not fly and he remains in jail. Two authors have already written books about the murders: Joe McGinniss’s bestselling Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which actually turned the spotlight on McGinniss’s reporting. After his own analysis of the facts, Morris has decided that MacDonald is, in fact, innocent, and his book lays out his conclusions. Morris, by the way, has been studying this case for more than two decades.
Morris has received an Emmy, a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. In addition to feature documentaries, he has directed thousands of commercials.
Buy A Wilderness of Error here.
Visit Morris’s packed-with-information website.
The New York Times profiled Morris’s book.
A.O. Scott, the New York Times’s film critic, looked back at Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (with clips).
Morris writes columns for the New York Times.
CNN Money reviewed the book. So did the Atlantic.
Follow him on Twitter.
He appeared on NPR.
Smithsonian magazine profiled Morris, and gives lots of background. It’s a great article.
CBS News recently covered Morris’s new work.
And now, let’s check in with our good friend, Jon Stewart!
Congratulations, Jon and TDS staff, on your early writing Emmy. *Shaking fist* As frequently happens these days, we’re missing the name of one guest–Thursday’s.
Monday, 9/17: Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan, the Ghanian former Secretary-General of the UN and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has written a new book that’s part biography, part political analysis: Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Trained as a scientist in various universities, including MIT, he began his career working for the World Health Organization and has dealt with the spread of AIDS in Africa as well as the violence that took such a toll in Darfur.
He has a foundation dedicated to strengthening democracy globally. Here is their mission statement: “The Foundation has developed programmes and partnerships in three main focus areas: (i) Peace and Security; (ii) Sustainable Development; and (iii) Human Rights and the Rule of Law.”
He appeared on NPR, where he spoke about recent events in Syria as well as the new book.
He criticized the way we fund our elections. Mr. Annan . . . I am with you!
Tuesday, 9/18: Salman Rushdie
Author Salman Rushdie’s name became a household word when he came under a fatawa (or death sentence) for his book, The Satanic Verses. For many years, he lay low, but he recently re-emerged. The Indian-born writer has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth, and honored with many awards for his work, including two Whitbread Prizes, the U.S. National Arts Award, and the Writers’ Guild Award. He’s currently the Chairman of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival.
He has a new book to discuss, out today: Joseph Anton: A Memoir, about the time he spent in hiding. Joseph Anton was the alias he used during this time–Joseph for Joseph Conrad; Anton for Anton Chekhov.
Here’s his full author page on the Random House website, with links for all his books they publish.
Visit his website.
Follow him on Twitter.
Wednesday, 9/19: Pink
Pink’s got a new album, The Truth About Love. This is the sixth release for the woman born Alecia Beth Moore and her first since becoming a mom. Pink has won several Grammys, supports PETA, and works with a number of organizations dedicated to protecting animals and children, including UNICEF.
Visit her website.
Follow her on Twitter.
Like her on Facebook.
She likes to sing upside-down.
Here’s a great page to get some stories about her.
.
Thursday, September 20: TBA
That’s it for this week! Let me know which guests you are most looking forward to.
Cheers, everyone.
Better Know a Guest: September 17 – 20, 2012
Hello, Hubsters
Well, the last month or so has been a little off-center, what with music fests, conventions, strange schedules, and a vacation after the big political tent shows. This Monday, things finally return to normal, and it looks as if we have some fantastic episodes ahead of us. I’m particularly excited about two of Stephen’s guests, but more on that later.
Much has happened in the past few days, and as usual, Stephen and Jon will have plenty of material at their disposal. There’s a lot I could go into, because certainly everyone here knows my political perspective, and Romney has had a plethora of foot-in-mouth incidents recently. However, this time I will not dwell on Romney and the day-to-day battle for the White House. Instead, I prefer to take a moment of silence in memory of those who lost their lives in the US Embassy in Libya, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. (Read this wonderful New York Times tribute to Stevens.) September 11th seems to me a cursed day and it proved so once again this year. I know that tragedy is not generally comedians’ stock in trade, but I am certain both Stephen and Jon will find an appropriate way to address this sorrowful occasion.
As Stephen said this past week at his talk with Friar James Martin: “If someone spreads hate… then they’re not your religious leader.” Would that the world were as gentle and sensible and logical as Stephen. It would be a better place.
I’d like to wish all my Jewish readers L’shana tova, or a Happy New Year. Yes, it’s Rosh Hashanah. Can the atone phone be far away?
Monday, 9/17: Drew Faust
Drew Faust, the Virginia-born president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History, has a special interest: the Civil War and the American South. That alone makes me look forward to her visit, because as we know, it’s a subject that engages Stephen, too. Her book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, examines the huge loss of life during that brother-against-brother conflict. More than 600,000 soldiers perished—which the summary on the publisher’s page says would be equivalent to six million in proportion to today’s population—and that doesn’t even take into account the numbers of seriously maimed. Faust explores how this carnage affected and altered our entire nation, and she weaves first-person accounts from people of all walks of life through her discussion. Faust won numerous awards and praise for this work, including the Bancroft Prize and a mention as a New York Times Best Book; it also was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Although Republic of Suffering was published in 2008, it’s the inspiration for an episode of PBS’s American Experience, “Death and the Civil War,” which will air September 18th.
Before assuming the presidency of Harvard, Faust was founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her prior books all focus on the South, as well. They include Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War and Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War.
Visit Drew Faust’s Harvard website.
Harvard recently had a big cheating scandal and Faust addressed it.
Forbes listed her as #84 among the 100 most powerful women. And, in an article in the same magazine, she offered students career advice.
When she became head of the once all-male Harvard—the first woman to hold that job–the New York Times profiled her. It says she marched in the civil rights protests of the 1960s; maybe she was near Stephen’s pregnant mom, carrying her boy in his first march?
Watch her commencement address at Harvard this year. And then you can read her beginning of year message for this fall semester.
Read an interview with Faust in which she discusses our fascination with war.
Tuesday, 9/18: Jeffrey Toobin
New Yorker writer and CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin has always focused on legal issues. His most famous work, the acclaimed and award-winning The Nine, closely examined the justices of the Supreme Court. Now he returns to the Supremes, but with a different slant. His new book, which comes out the very day of his TCR appearance, is The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. Toobin specifically zooms in on the diametrically opposed philosophies of President Obama and Chief Justice John Roberts. The synopsis provided by the publisher (which the link above leads to) states the problem interestingly and succinctly: “Both men are young, brilliant, charismatic, charming, determined to change the course of the nation—and completely at odds on almost every major constitutional issue. One is radical; one essentially conservative. The surprise is that Obama is the conservative…” The title alludes to—or at least, partially alludes to—the fact that Roberts bungled the wording when he administered Obama’s oath of office on inauguration day.
Toobin comes by his journalist bent genetically, as his mother, Marlene Sanders, was a well-known correspondent for both ABC and CBS, while his father, Jerome Toobin worked as a news producer. Although he did some sports reporting as an undergraduate, he shifted gears and became editor of the Harvard Law Review while getting his law degree from that same university. Toobin worked as an attorney for several years before moving to the New Yorker and ABC News and he’s won an Emmy® for his reporting.
Follow Toobin on Twitter.
Here’s his New Yorker page.
Read his bio at CNN.com.
For all his inside knowledge of the Supreme Court, Toobin thought that the justices would strike down Obamacare. They didn’t, and he admitted that he got it wrong.
He just did an interview with the Star Tribune about The Oath.
Toobin has been on The Colbert Report several times before, usually not as the main guest, but as a legal analyst when a major Supreme Court decision is in the offing. He came on to discuss the Obamacare ruling; Citizens United; and Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination.
Here’s what Toobin had to say about Akin, the “legitimate rape” comment, and abortion. A clear-eyed perspective beyond the obvious.
Wednesday, 9/19: Itzhak Perlman
Here comes part one of the guests I’m super-excited about in this fantastic week of people. Impish and fun, Israeli-born violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman is always delightful and one of the clearest, most appealing proselytizers of classical music. And just in time for the Jewish holidays he has a new and somewhat unusual recording: rather than Bach or Beethoven or Mozart or Mendelssohn, Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul, features Jewish liturgical music and showcases the singing of Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot. (For those who do not know, a cantor accompanies the rabbi, singing the prayers in a synagogue.) On Perlman’s site, he describes it as “beloved liturgical and traditional Jewish works in new arrangements backed by chamber orchestra and klezmer musicians.” This is, by the way, Ashkenazy religious music; the music of the Jews from Eastern Europe, rather than the Sephardic or Arab/Spanish Jews, which sounds quite different.
Perlman, who contracted polio as a child and uses either a brace and crutches to walk or a scooter at this point, first trained at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv. He then came to New York, where he had a much-coveted appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and continued his studies at Julliard. He has gone on to play with virtually every major orchestra in the world; won the Kennedy Center Honor, the Medal of Liberty, and the National Medal of Arts, as well as four Emmys® and 15 Grammys® (including a lifetime one); and performed at Obama’s inauguration festivities. Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Roosevelt, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Yeshiva, and Hebrew Universities have all bestowed him with honorary degrees. You can also hear Perlman on the soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust-themed film, Schindler’s List. He now teaches at his alma mater, Julliard, and also runs his own summer program for budding musicians. In addition to violin, he now regularly steps up to the podium to conduct.
The discography section on his website has links to buy all his CDs.
Read an interview about the album in the Jewish Press.
Read a review of Eternal Echoes in Opera Today.
Like him on Facebook.
Visit his YouTube channel.
Watch a video of Perlman and Cantor Helfgot performing music from the new album.
He just closed the Hollywood Bowl classical season. Read a review of his performance..
Perlman appeared on PBS’s Great Performances, on the art of the violin .
The rumor that won’t go away: That he once finished a concert with a broken string. Snopes debunks this myth.
Watch this video of him performing at the White House in honor of Israeli president Shimon Peres. Gee, wouldn’t it be fun to have your favorite artists come to your home to perform? If I were president, I’d have an evening-length show hosted by Stephen, and featuring David Hallberg, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Patrick Stewart and Alan Rickman doing some dialogue.
Perlman appeared on Charlie Rose and on NPR.
Thursday, 9/20: Errol Morris
Part two of the super-excitement for me: Welcome one of my favorite documentary filmmakers to the Report! If you have not seen Errol Morris’s brilliant, groundbreaking The Thin Blue Line, get thee to Netflix or to anywhere you can find a copy. In it, Morris, a former private investigator, examines the facts behind a man’s murder conviction—and ultimately gathers enough evidence to have him exonerated and released. It’s compelling and totally original. Another favorite of mine is Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, in which Morris profiles four very different men: one who does animal topiary; another who studies the blind, hairless mole rat; a lion tamer, and an robotics scientist who was developing small robots to explore outer space (it’s from him that the film’s title came). If you wonder how a coherent film can result from this wildly varying quartet, trust me—it can. It’s simply a stunning look at humans, nature, and our attempts to know and control the universe beyond us.
One of Morris’s inventions, and one that affects the very soul of his works, is the “interrotron.” It enables the person interviewed—and Morris almost always conducts multiple interviews in his works—to face him directly while also looking straight into the camera. It creates an intimacy, a bond, a rapport between the two that could never exist without that close interaction. The resulting films have won numerous awards, including an Oscar® for Fog of War, in which Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, offered a brutally frank assessment of the huge mistakes he made in Vietnam. Another highly disturbing work, Mr. Death, looks at Fred Leuchter, Jr., who invented some of the devices used to administer the death penalty in American prisons; he’s also a Holocaust denier and Morris accompanies him as he tries to make his case. I must point out that Morris does NOT accept the denial, and finds it horrific. But it speaks to his interest in notions of truth and lies, facts and falsehoods, knowing and unknowability, and it’s chilling.
But Morris isn’t actually visiting Stephen to discuss his films, because his newest work is a book—although it follows the same path as his documentaries. A Wilderness of Errors: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, once again explores a man’s conviction for murder. MacDonald was judged guilty of killing his pregnant wife and daughters, a horrific crime he has always denied doing. He instead claimed that a group of hippies high on drugs committed the murders; this all happened in the wake of the infamous Manson massacre, where a cult undeniably caused the bloodbath. Here, MacDonald’s explanation did not fly and he remains in jail. Two authors have already written books about the murders: Joe McGinniss’s bestselling Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which actually turned the spotlight on McGinniss’s reporting. After his own analysis of the facts, Morris has decided that MacDonald is, in fact, innocent, and his book lays out his conclusions. Morris, by the way, has been studying this case for more than two decades.
Morris has received an Emmy, a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. In addition to feature documentaries, he has directed thousands of commercials.
Buy A Wilderness of Error here.
Visit Morris’s packed-with-information website.
The New York Times profiled Morris’s book.
A.O. Scott, the New York Times’s film critic, looked back at Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (with clips).
Morris writes columns for the New York Times.
CNN Money reviewed the book. So did the Atlantic.
Follow him on Twitter.
He appeared on NPR.
Smithsonian magazine profiled Morris, and gives lots of background. It’s a great article.
CBS News recently covered Morris’s new work.
And now, let’s check in with our good friend, Jon Stewart!
Congratulations, Jon and TDS staff, on your early writing Emmy. *Shaking fist* As frequently happens these days, we’re missing the name of one guest–Thursday’s.
Monday, 9/17: Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan, the Ghanian former Secretary-General of the UN and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has written a new book that’s part biography, part political analysis: Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Trained as a scientist in various universities, including MIT, he began his career working for the World Health Organization and has dealt with the spread of AIDS in Africa as well as the violence that took such a toll in Darfur.
He has a foundation dedicated to strengthening democracy globally. Here is their mission statement: “The Foundation has developed programmes and partnerships in three main focus areas: (i) Peace and Security; (ii) Sustainable Development; and (iii) Human Rights and the Rule of Law.”
He appeared on NPR, where he spoke about recent events in Syria as well as the new book.
He criticized the way we fund our elections. Mr. Annan . . . I am with you!
Tuesday, 9/18: Salman Rushdie
Author Salman Rushdie’s name became a household word when he came under a fatawa (or death sentence) for his book, The Satanic Verses. For many years, he lay low, but he recently re-emerged. The Indian-born writer has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth, and honored with many awards for his work, including two Whitbread Prizes, the U.S. National Arts Award, and the Writers’ Guild Award. He’s currently the Chairman of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival.
He has a new book to discuss, out today: Joseph Anton: A Memoir, about the time he spent in hiding. Joseph Anton was the alias he used during this time–Joseph for Joseph Conrad; Anton for Anton Chekhov.
Here’s his full author page on the Random House website, with links for all his books they publish.
Visit his website.
Follow him on Twitter.
Wednesday, 9/19: Pink
Pink’s got a new album, The Truth About Love. This is the sixth release for the woman born Alecia Beth Moore and her first since becoming a mom. Pink has won several Grammys, supports PETA, and works with a number of organizations dedicated to protecting animals and children, including UNICEF.
Visit her website.
Follow her on Twitter.
Like her on Facebook.
She likes to sing upside-down.
Here’s a great page to get some stories about her.
.
Thursday, September 20: TBA
That’s it for this week! Let me know which guests you are most looking forward to.
Cheers, everyone.