Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders

Evan Kleiman's love for pie began when she was a little girl and asked for an apple pie instead of a birthday cake. She still has a birthday pie to celebrate her birthday every July, but this summer was different. She baked a pie a day for the whole summer.

One of the world's longest-lived religious rites, the hajj to Mecca, is even older than Islam. It has been described as a universal journey for transcendence and peace, but will that change this year given the fear surrounding H1N1? What does it mean to 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide?

All her life, Joanna Greenfield dreamed of traveling to Africa to study wild animals. She got a once in a lifetime chance to follow wild chimpanzees in East Africa while she was still in college, an adventure strangely enhanced by her impaired vision.

Barack Obama has it. George W. Bush didn't. It's called global competence and according to experts in higher education, it's something everybody needs, the ability to understand complex issues in a globalized world. We talk to educators and students about what global competence really means.

Mary Cappello, the author of Called Back, a stunning memoir about surviving breast cancer, says cancer is like entering a foreign country where you have to learn a foreign language. Some people shut down and live like strangers in a strange land. Mary fought back, questioning everything, the pamphlets, the blogs, the kitsch and the pink ribbon.

French food is not what it used to be, or so says journalist and wine columnist Michael Steinberger. In his latest book, Au Revoir To All That, he investigates the decline of quality in French cuisine and finds reasons that go beyond food.

Scientist James Lovelock is best known as the originator of the Gaia Theory, which has taught scientists and laypeople alike to see the Earth holistically as a giant living organism. He joins us to discuss his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, in which he issues a dire warning: It is too late to halt global warming, we must now learn to live in an altered climate.

Storytelling seems to be a huge coping skill for Vietnam vets, and Wayne Karlin has quite a story to tell in Wandering Souls, about the courage of a soldier who returned the soul of the man he killed to that man's family.

Throughout her life and her work, German-Romanian writer Herta Muller has fought a lonely fight against repression. Even though winning the Nobel Prize in Literature this year has catapulted her into the media spotlights, few people are familiar with her unsettling and meticulous prose and poetry. In the light of Romania's painful past under communist dictatorship, we explore the meaning of Muller's life and work for our world today.

Do you remember November 9th, 1989? Journalist Michael Meyer and scholar Konrad Jarausch join us as we relive that day when the Berlin Wall fell and retrace Germany's difficult transitions through unification and integration, up to today.

Pastrami on Rye with a kosher pickle, anyone? Join us, and add to our list of reasons why it is imperative to save the Jewish deli.

The German poet Novalis once wrote that the only real temple in this world is the human body. If that is true, Joumana Haddad, who just launched Jasad magazine in Beirut (Jasad means Body in Arabic), is doing her best to restore the body to its rightful place, and raising a lot of eyebrows in the process.

Playing poker was a key networking tool in Barack Obama's early political career. Bill Gates collected many of his business strategies and a sizable fund to start Microsoft from his all-night poker games. Eisenhower and JFK used poker tactics to resolve crises with China and the Soviet Union. How did a French aristocratic parlor game turn into a training ground for American risk-takers and power brokers?

Although Americans hear about Islam on a daily basis, there remains no clear explanation of Islam or its people. Jean Feraca talks to a scholar of Islamic law about growing up in California and balancing her South Asian, Muslim, and American identities.

Don't believe the hype you hear about the decline of America and the dawn of a new Asian age. Minxin Pei, director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, joins us to pick apart this familiar narrative.