Since the 1973 release of his first album, Closing Time, Tom Waits has won fans over with his original songwriting and distinctive, gravelly vocal style. Musicians including Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen and Rod Stewart have recorded covers of his songs. He has also acted in films, including Sylvester Stallone's Paradise Alley, Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law and Robert Altman's Short Cuts. Waits has two new CDs out this month: Alice and Blood Money.
We remember paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. He died Monday at the age of 60. Gould was a professor of geology at Harvard and curator of the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He wrote columns for Natural History Magazine and Discover Magazine, and had written several books, including the award-winning The Mismeasure of Man. Gould used his writing and teaching to demystify the scientific method and to provide a historical perspective on science for the layman.
Advertising great Mary Wells Lawrence. Her career spans the 1960s to the 1980s, and she created many memorable campaigns. She is responsible for the Alka-Selzer "Plop Plop Fizz Fizz," and the slogan, "I Love New York." Her new book is called A Big Life (in Advertising) (Knopf). She is a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame and the Copywriters Hall of Fame.
Mel Levine, M.D. The founder of the All Kinds of Minds Institute and the Director of the Center for Development and Learning has just written a book called A Mind at a Time: America's Top Learning Expert Shows How Every Child Can Succeed. Levine is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School.
Writer Nick Hornby's novel, About a Boy, has been made into a film starring Hugh Grant and Toni Collette. It opens Friday, May 17. Hornby also wrote the novel High Fidelity, which became a hit film of the same name starring John Cusack. This interview first aired Sept. 26, 1995.
TV critic David Bianculli wraps up May ratings sweeps. He talks about the season finales of the shows Survivor, The Practice and The X-Files, and discusses reunion specials such as The Cosby Show: A Look Back.
Sherpa Jamling Tenzing Norgay was Climbing Leader for the 1996 Everest IMAX Filming Expedition and summitted the Mountain that year. He's also the son of Tenzing Norgay, one of the first men in history to summit Mt. Everest. In his book, Touching My Father's Soul, Jamling Norgay recounts his 1996 Mt. Everest ascent: the climb and its familial meaning. He now heads Tenzing Norgay Adventures, which is based in India. This interview originally aired April 19, 2001.
Journalist Scott Anderson. He traveled with a platoon of elite Isreali commandos into the West Bank and wrote about it in the article "An Impossible Occupation" which was the cover story of last Sundays New York Times Magazine.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the evolution of World Wide Web naming conventions, such as attaching "e" or "cyber" in front of everything Internet.
Since September 11th, Joel Meyerowitz has taken over 7000 photographs of Ground Zero. He gained unlimited access to the site and did so in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York. A selection of those pictures can been seen in the May 20th issue of The New Yorker.
Maria Rosa Menocal is a R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is also the author of the new book: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown). Menocal details Andalucia, Spain from 786 to 1492 where literature, science, and tolerance flourished.
Writer, musician and broadcaster Jamie Bernstein Thomas. She is the daughter of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. She hosts The New York Festival of Song on WQXR which features highlights from that concert series. She and her siblings founded the Bernstein Education Through the Arts (BETA) Fund. On Friday, May 24th she will be the speaker for a production of Leonard Bernstein Symphony No. 3, Kaddish based on the Jewish liturgical prayer. The concert will be part of the Cinncinnati May Festival held at Cincinnati historic Music Hall.
This year marks the centennial of the birth of composer Richard Rodgers. He was born on June 28, 1902. Rodgers was one of Americas most prolific and best-loved composers. He collaborated with Lorenz Hart on the songs "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady is a Tramp," "Blue Moon" and "Bewitched." Later he went on to collaborate with Oscar Hammerstein on the musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. Well hear a concert of Rodgers songs performed by singer Rebecca Kilgore and pianist Dave Frishberg.
Film critic John Powers reviews Lagaan, the new film from India made in Bollywood which he says may be one of the few Indian films to make it big over here. Its already been released in England and is also released on DVD.
Writer Alec Wilkinson is the author of new memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin) about his relationship with writer and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was fiction editor for the New Yorker from 1936-1976 and worked with such authors as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty and scores of others. Maxwell was the author of a number of novels, including Time Will Darken It, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as several short story collections. He died at the age of 91 in August 2000.
Novelist Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm which was made into a film, and the short story collection Demonology. He calls his new book, The Black Veil, a "sort of non-fiction novel." It parallels Moody's investigation of his own family's history of depression. He found that one of his ancestors — a clergyman — was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Minister's Black Veil."
