Cultured Media

Discussion with Laura Waters Hinson, director and producer of “As We Forgive,” about her stumbling upon her thesis topic on a church trip to Rwanda, told the ongoing story of reconciliation between killers and the families of genocide victims. The majority of militia members have been released after confessing their slaughter of women and children. Some have chosen to do community service in penitence. Plus, a look at a new Rwandan report accusing top French officials of complicity in the 1994 genocide.

Listen on the Diane Rehm Show

The world food supply is an oligarchy. Only a few large corporations have control of the supply chain. Farmer suicides are up. Even our supermarkets are designed to cause us to buy highly processed foods. Raj Patel explores the global food system and what he contends are its inefficiencies in Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Mr. Patel details how food is produced, marketed and sold and reports that currently more people are starving and more are overweight than at any other time in history. Raj Patel discusses his book with Evan Kleiman, host of the radio program “Good Food” that is heard on Southern California NPR affiliate KCRW. Raj Patel is a fellow at the Institute for Food & Development/Food First and has written for the Guardian and Los Angeles Times. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies.

Listen on After Words

In “The Return of History and the End of Dreams,” Robert Kagan, Washington Post columnist and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior associate, argues that the international stability predicted after the end of the Cold War did not emerge and that instead we now have a contest for power between liberal democracies, autocratic governments, and radical Islamists.? He states that the majority of the world has regressed into 19th century diplomacy with their spheres of influence.

Listen on Book TV

A special program about the housing crisis. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money. Ira Glass and his associates interview mortgage buyers and investors.

Listen on This American Life

Why Islamic states thrived for hundreds of years, what led to their downfall, and the some of current challenges of Islamic governments in the modern world. Noah Feldman, professor at Harvard Law School, is a contributing writer for the “New York Times Magazine,” adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Divided by God, What We Owe Iraq,” “After Jihad” and “The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State.”

Listen on Diane Rehm

One of the few African-American, female billionaires describes how to empower women all over the world and her life as a musician, entrepreneur, advocate for the arts, and philanthropist. I’m going to guess that I don’t agree with her politically (and how can someone who has made money with BET advocate for women not being exploited?) but I am glad that she advocates for women’s education in third world countries. Did you know that 75% of women in the world are illiterate?

Listen to interview with Sheila Johnson

A chocolate expert discusses the intricacies of buying, storing, tasting, judging and, most of all, savoring the world’s most heavenly chocolates. Clay Gordon is editor and publisher of Chocophile.com and the founder of the New World Chocolate Society.

Listen to interview on Diane Rehm about Discover Chocolate

Evangelicals, once at the periphery of American life, now wield power in the White House and on Wall Street, at Harvard and in Hollywood. How have they reached the pinnacles of power in such a short time? And what does this mean for evangelicals–and for America? Drawing on personal interviews with an astonishing array of prominent Americans–including two former Presidents, dozens of political and government leaders, more than 100 top business executives, plus Hollywood moguls, intellectuals, athletes, and other powerful figures–D. Michael Lindsay shows first-hand how they are bringing their vision of moral leadership into the public square.

D. Michael Lindsay is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University where he is also the Faculty Associate of Leadership Rice and Assistant Director of the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life. He is the author of two books, both with George Gallup, Jr., and has written many scholarly and popular essays.

This Authors@Google event took place October 5, 2007 at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

YouTube - Authors@Google: Michael Lindsay

In The Israel Lobby, which grew out of a controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Walt and co-author John Mearsheimer examine the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. They argue that American support for Israel cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.

Fresh Air: Author Stephen Walt Takes On The Israel Lobby

Those are the words that Journalist Paul Watson heard as he took a photograph of a battered, mutilated American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. His war-zone work leaves him suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress, and he says the Mogadishu photo still haunts him. Wilson believes his photograph prevented intervention into Rwanda’s genocide to save hundred of thousands of lives and empowered Al-Qaeda. The war leader that Americans were chasing at the time sent a thank you letter to Wilson for providing propaganda for his forces. He even invited Wilson for dinner.

Fresh Air: Journalist Paul Watson on Witnessing War