Episoder
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In the last of his essays reflecting on America's search for meaning, James Naughtie recalls a meeting a year ago with General Michael Hayden - the former head of the CIA - who, without fanfare, expressed concern for the future of US Democracy.
'I don’t know that we’ll come through this,’ he said. ‘Right now I think it’s about 50-50.’
James reflects on past presidents, such as Jimmy Carter, and his dedication to the promotion and protection of democracy around the world, and compares it to the present, as we enter the final days of the 2024 campaign.
What might a tight result might mean in the coming months? 'The system will be on trial,' he writes, recalling the legal battles over the 'hanging chads' of 2000 in which the fate of the nation was decided on just 537 votes.
Producer: Sheila CookSound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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James Naughtie argues that a common American identity will be achieved - one day - despite the heightened political rhetoric around immigration, that is making it one of the most contentious issues in this year's presidential election.
He recalls Ronald Reagan's 'homely evocation of an American character'. For Reagan, James says, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses', had real contemporary power.
For many Republicans today, he says, it's a very different story.
But he sees signs of change. On a recent visit to the US border in Arizona, he met a 'cattleman of resolute conservative views in his 80s', who tells James that although he's fed up with armed drug runners using his land, he believes most people cutting through the fence are 'good people, in search of new lives'.
'The huddled masses will be absorbed... eventually', James writes. 'But the question right now is how much damage will be done in getting there - to the principles of their democracy, and perhaps to their precious belief in themselves.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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Mangler du episoder?
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From the description of Alexander Hamilton as 'the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar', to Lyndon Johnson's depiction of Gerald Ford as a man who 'couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time', James Naughtie argues that American political language has long been teeming with insult.
He recalls as a student in 1974, queuing at the back door of the White House one evening and coming away with transcripts of the Watergate tapes, full of 'expletive deleted' notes 'that blacked out various Nixon explosions.'
But in our own time, James says, something quite different is at play. The language of politics today, he says, 'instead of being punctuated by insults, it's become enslaved to them. And the more exaggerated political language becomes, the more it is devalued - because it has lost its true purpose.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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James Naughtie presents the first of four personal essays exploring America's 'wild search for meaning' in the run-up to November's presidential election.
From the freezing waters of Nantucket Sound in Moby Dick, via sunken levees of the Mississippi and the railroad blues of New Orleans, to the ‘raucous expeditions into an underworld of…richly wounded humanity’ in contemporary crime novels, James contemplates this moment in the United States through its fiction.
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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Adam Gopnik revisits two famous American essays from the 1960s and finds a remarkably contemporary vision - and one 'that seems to have an application to our own time and its evident crisis.'
He couples Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' with Daniel Boorstin's 1962 classic on 'image' and America's tenuous relationship with facts.
'It is the admixture of Hofstadter's political paranoia with Boorstin's cult of publicity,' writes Adam, 'that makes Trump so very different from previous political figures.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Tom Bigwood
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From Kamala Harris' 'word salads' to her views about wealth redistribution, Zoe Strimpel finds little to like in a Harris presidency.
But it's her views on Israel that Zoe finds particularly hard to stomach.
'In those halcyon days of my youth,' says Zoe, 'our family's concerns that the leader of the free world protect Israel was normal, uncontroversial and, with Clinton and Bush at the helm, not a particular worry... But Kamala's hazy demands for instant deals and ceasefires,' she writes, 'are like nails on a chalkboard to me.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood
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With the help of certain Conservative politicians, form number 48879-2039-876/WC and a rabbit hutch, Howard Jacobson takes a wry look at the advantages of a nanny state.
Producer: Adele ArmstrongSound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Sarah Wadeson
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Three of Megan Nolan's close friends have given birth in the past year. Another two are doing IVF. And anyone who can afford to, Megan says, is freezing their eggs.
Megan reflects on how attitudes to having children have changed profoundly in Ireland in the space of a generation.
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood
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As America gears up for next week's debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Sarah Dunant looks at the seismic shift in sexual politics in the US since Trump debated with Hillary Clinton.
'Looming, threatening, even the word stalking was used' to describe that encounter, Sarah remembers.
But when this presidential debate gets underway in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time, Sarah thinks it will be a very different story.
'An encounter worth losing sleep for,' she reckons.
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Tom Bigwood
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In the week that one of Britain's most famous Paralympians Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced to crawl off a train, Tom Shakespeare describes his encounters with crawling.
'Don't get me wrong,' Tom says, I am not against crawling.' His holidays, he says, involve a lot of crawling: in Egypt to visit the apartment of the poet Constantine Cavafy or in Italy to see the childhood home of the communist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci.
But in day to day life, Tom argues, 'crawling is no way for adults to go about their business.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Tom Bigwood
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At a village fete in rural France, AL Kennedy finds herself among barrel organs, sleeping piglets and 'a guy in a flowing blue smock gliding about on an ancient motor bicycle, just because he could.'
After US Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz turned the word 'weird' into 'the soundtrack of our summer,' Alison relishes how the concept is reclaiming its roots.
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood
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David Goodhart says that with 40% of universities facing deficits and, he believes, too many graduates chasing too few graduate jobs, it's time for a rethink on universities.
And he has a reassuring message for those who didn't make the grade in Thursday's A level results.
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Jonathan Glover Production coordinator: Sabine SchereckEditor: Tom Bigwood
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Sara Wheeler on why sleeping in Captain Scott's bunk in the Antarctic got her thinking about imposter syndrome.
'It took me many years,' writes Sara, 'to realise that I had as much right to be in Captain Scott's hut as anyone else, because nobody owns the Antarctic, or the hut, or Scott's legacy."
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Rod Farquhar Production coordinator: Janet StaplesEditor: Tom Bigwood
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Will Self muses on change as he prepares for a stem cell transplant, an operation 'which will result in the greatest change in what has been a notably changeable life.'
And he discusses the preparations he's making which he believes put him 'in pole position to race with this ...devilish adversary.'
He concludes that the art of living is about recognizing that 'life is in continual flux - and our vacillating wills and changeable natures, psychic and physical alike, are just part of the cosmic churn - nothing in fact endures, but change itself.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Tom Bigwood
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As the Olympics gets underway, Michael Morpurgo says we need to take care that the event doesn't stray too far from the ideals of the Olympics and the Paralympics.
'The announcement this year,' writes Michael, 'that athletes at the Olympics will, for the first time, be awarded prize money - $50,000 for each gold medal - sets a precedent in the Games' 128 year history.'
But, he says, 'over the next two weeks, I should like to think that the Olympics will uphold the spirit that has sustained the Games for so long... that the glory is in the laurel wreath or the medal, that the heroism is in the triumphs and disasters.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Tom Bigwood
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Adam Gopnik muses on why he'll always love the steam baths in New York.
'My own pet answer,' Adam says, 'justified by intuition and half-heard rumours, is that it helps sleep to have a low internal body temperature. All that sweating lowers my own burning inner furnace and makes me more able to sleep.' This is, he admits, 'a perfectly sound scientific explanation that I have no intention of checking.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam MorreyEditor: Tom Bigwood
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Sarah Dunant argues that Joe Biden's refusal to understand his moment in history is forcing the nation to confront the fact that she is no longer young.
'In the relatively short history of America from new country to super power,' writes Sarah, 'she has always - even when she behaves badly - projected an aura of self confidence, a vitality, almost cocky certainty that we associate with youth. And for the longest time, it made for an optimism, a sense of can do, that sometimes felt like manifest destiny.'
That, Sarah argues, is starting to change.
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Tom Bigwood
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A night walk, listening to nightingales, and a memory of her late father lead Rebecca Stott to ponder Iris Murdoch's theory of 'unselfing'.
The theory, writes Rebecca, was 'essentially about looking out and beyond ourselves and away from what Murdoch described as the 'fat, relentless ego.''
In this post election moment, Rebecca says, 'to rise to the challenges of housing, global migration, war, the cost of living, and the crisis of climate breakdown, as well as countering the global rise of nationalism and tribal politics, we might have to find ways to radically unself not just as individuals but as whole nations.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor Tom Bigwood
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Mary Beard argues that 21st Century disputes about what museums should own - or give back - are far from being a modern phenomenon.
'Almost as far back as you can go, there have been contests about what museums should display, and where objects of heritage properly belonged,' writes Mary. 'These debates are written into museum history.'
From the Great Bed of Ware to the Lewis Chessmen, Mary reflects on how we determine who owns objects from the distant past.
Sometimes, she says, as in the case of the Broighter Hoard, it comes down to the kind of craziness of deciding whether 'some anonymous Iron Age bloke had planned to come back for his stuff, or not!'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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Megan Nolan ponders her generation's housing crisis.
'Sometimes it all crashes over me, how adrift I am, and how laughably inconceivable the idea is that I would ever own a place on my own,' writes Megan.
But there are other ways of framing this dilemma too, she believes. 'My favourite of those is to think that I'm unusually capable of feeling at home in the world at large, instead of just one building, or just one town....There are parts of me that would not exist except for my privilege to live in other places, those parts were born all over the world, and I remember the luck of that when I feel at a loss about bricks and mortar.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter BosherProduction coordinator: Gemma AshmanEditor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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