Programs for the Week of 11/14

Jean’s Pick of the Week: It Calls You Back: I remember Luis Rodriguez from an interview I did with him many years ago when his first memoir, Always Running, came out. All these years later he seems to have acquired a leathery patina and near guru status. What he exemplifies, it seems to me, is what Socrates tried to teach us at his trial in 399 BC: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Luis Rodriguiz reminds us that self-examination is a process that is never finished.

Monday: Listen to This!: Does music have the power to transcend time and place? Through his experience with music from Iceland to China, from France to Minneapolis, New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross, has learned that music has to power to transport us to places and times we might never visit otherwise.

Tuesday: Peace Corps Writers: 2001 Washington Post reported that the Peace Corps community is "churning out enough works - memoirs, novels, and books of poetry - to warrant a whole new genre: Peace Corps Literature." Two returned Peace Corps volunteers talk about the Peace Corps experiences that inspired their writing careers.

Wednesday: How Yoga Won the West: Journalist Ann Louise Bardach credits the Indian mystic Vivekananda with introducing yoga into the national conversation, back in 1893. The 31 year old mystic made a huge impact at the opening of the Parliament of Religions on Sept. 11, 1893, where he dazzled the audience with his show-stopping improvised talks on eastern philosophy - and yoga.

Thursday: Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America: A sixty-year-old biker rides the length of America’s borders, both south and north, to explore our conflicted relationship with our neighbors.

Friday: The Table Comes First: Never before has society cared so much about food, says New Yorker writer Adam Gotnip, with celebrity chefs and restaurants treated as places of pilgrimage. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives? The Table Comes First is one man’s quest to find the answer to that question.

I’ll be with family in New York later in the week, leaving Here on Earth in the very capable hands of my colleagues, Veronica Rueckert and Lori Skelton.

Jean