Story Archives of 'Culture'

Have Americans become too obsessed with wealth and status? Former New Hampshire state senator Jim Rubens has written a new book claiming society has lifted the definition of success to near impossible heights – achieving fame, having the body of a supermodel or joining the ranks of the super rich - and that it's resulted in the collapse of our ethical standards and made Americans increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied with their day-to-day lives. We’ll talk with Jim Rubens about how “Over-Success" came to be and what can be done to stop it.

Guest

• Jim Rubens, former New Hampshire state senator, member of the Granite State Angels at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientists

In our latest installment of our 25 in 25 series, Yankee Magazine Editor-in-Chief and New England icon Jud Hale joins us. Born in Boston, raised in Maine and a longtime New Hampshire resident, Hale’s as Yankee as they come. We’ll look back at his fifty-year publishing career and how his magazine’s portrayal of a “New England Yankee Ideal” has changed over the past quarter century.

Guest

• Judson Hale, editor-in-chief of Yankee Magazine and editor for The Old Farmer’s Almanac

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. He is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In the 1977 film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", space aliens and human beings figure out that they can communicate through a simple musical phrase. The movie was one of the first to portray aliens not as enemy invaders to be wary of, but as friendly beings sharing a universe with us. Tonight on the Front Porch, we'll look at real-life examples of people using music to bridge cultural rifts. We'll talk with Harlow Robinson, a member of the Yale Russian Chorus alumni group. When he was an undergraduate, he organized the YRC's trip to Russia during the height of the Cold War.

The YRC alumni group will perform at Dartmouth this Sunday. Click here for more information.

We'll also speak with Ed Gerskey, chief of music programs for the Voice of America radio service about the way the VOA has tried over the years to share the popular culture of the U.S. with countries around the world.

It's no secret that New England has inspired a lot of writers- and a lot of writing.

Over the past 400 years, hundreds of books have dissected nearly every aspect of the region's history, geography, people and culture.

But no single reference work has attempted a comprehensive picture of all six New England states.

Now, a pair of scholars from UNH has filled the gap with a massive new work, the Encyclopedia of New England.

NHPR's humanities reporter Kevin Gardner has more.