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Death is everywhere and nowhere in our society. Children see thousands of deaths on television before they’re ten, but rarely see an actual dead body, even at funerals. The same goes for grown-ups.

We watch movies that eroticize violent death and TV shows that sentimentalize hospital room leave-taking. It’s been a century since most Americans viewed dying as a normal part of life. These days, old age itself is both hidden and up front. Medicare, prescription drugs and Social Security fill the headlines. Yet old people are tucked away, gray hairs camouflaged.

For all the books that tell people how to cope with the emotions of death and dying, few focus on the gritty details of the process itself.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Donald Murray, author, “My Twice-Lived Life” and Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author, “How We Die.”

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Sanctions have been used on the global playing field since nation-states existed, but they’ve never been so popular as they are today. For a long time, sanctions were considered foreign policy freebies, a safe middle ground between going to war and doing nothing.

But in an increasingly globalized economy, there is a healthy dose of sanction skepticism. Big business insists that sanctions, especially unilateral ones, cost them Big Money. And there are humanitarian concerns and questions about who gets the U.S. door shut on them and who doesn’t.

Some experts say, plain and simple, that sanctions work and we need them. The promise and problems of sanctions.
(Hosted by Neal Conan)

Guests:

Brenda Shaffer – Research Director of the Caspian Studies program at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

Meghan O’Sullivan, expert on economic sanctions and a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington

and Richard Nuccio, Director of the Pell Center, Salve Regina University, and former special advisor to President Clinton on Cuba.