April 13-17 Programs

My Pick of the Week (why have I been referring to myself in the third person?): Noam Chomsky. At eighty, surrounded by adoring sycophantic twenty year olds, this guy is the Tony Bennett of intellectuals. He was pretty hard on Obama, and, as it turned out, hadn’t had the time to read his speech from the Turkish parliament, but I really liked the answer he gave to my question, “Who are your mentors? How did Noam Chomsky become Noam Chomsky?”

Next Week on Here on Earth:

Monday: Planet Forward: Take web-savvy pioneers, viewer-driven television and eco-friendly innovations and you have Planet Forward, a new series premiering on PBS next week. I'll talk with Emmy-winning host Frank Sesno about future green ideas and their genesis on web.

Tuesday: What a Billion Muslims Really Think: Dalia Mogahed is the Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. She’s coming to campus as a guest of the Lubar Instittute for Abrahamic Studies to talk about the findings of Gallup’s unprecedented survey of Muslims worldwide.

Wednesday: Slow Money: First there was Slow Food, then came Slow Cities, and now Slow Money. Not surprising, investor Woody Tasch’s controversial book about the nature of slow money includes a forward by Slow Food patriarch Carlo Petrini and carries the sub-title: Investing as if food, farms and fertility mattered. Bottom line? “In soil we trust.”

Thursday: Klezmer Camp: Henry Sapoznik has been on the UW-Madison campus this semester as the 2009 Visiting Scholar on Yiddish and American popular culture. A four-time Grammy nominee, he won a Peabody for the series, the "Yiddish Radio Project". He promises to play klezmer on his banjo when he joins us on Thursday.

Friday: Curries: Are you ready for 660 Indian Curries? Raghavan Iyer, an award-winning teacher of the year, joins us to lead us through the sour, salty, sweet, pungent, bitter gateway to Indian cooking.

Happy Easter, and may you find many hidden treasures besides the eggs.

Jean