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The Mighty Pen

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Friday, April 15, 2005

"The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?" is the title of a reading by world-renowned authors during the PEN World Voices festival that starts Saturday. Three of the readers, Salman Rushdie, Antonio Muñoz Molina and Ha Jin, explore that question and offer their views on the interplay of politics and literature.

Lesson Plan 1

Ninfa Segarra former president of the Board of Education, and former deputy mayor under Rudolph Giuliani
- on Mayor Bloomberg's education plan

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Lesson Plan 2

Jill Levy President of the Council of Supervisors & Administrators
- discusses the mayoral race and what the candidates are saying about education
» Council of Supervisors and Administration

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Lesson Plan 3

Randi Weingarten President of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and chair of the Municipal Labor Committee
- discusses the state of the Teachers Union and schools in New York City
» United Federation of Teachers

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After a Fashion

Anne Applebaum, Editorial Columnist at The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag : A History (Doubleday 2003),
- on the current "fashion" in drug approvals at the FDA
» Anne Applebaum column

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The Mighty Pen

Ha Jin, novelist and poet, PEN World Voices festival participant, professor of English at Boston University and National Book Award-winning author of War Trash (Pantheon, 2004),
and
Antonio Muñoz Molina, Spanish novelist and journalist, PEN World Voices festival participant, Director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York and ...

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Open Phones

listeners call in to tell us what they have overheard

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Books and Big Ears

Ha Jin, Antonio Munoz Molina and Salman Rushdie are taking part in a reading at Town Hall on Monday night. The title of the event is "The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?" We asked them if reading had changed them, Ha Jin singled out V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Antonio Munoz Molina pointed to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past for what it taught him about love. What books changed your life? Let us know.

Later in the show, we opened the phone for great eavesdropping exploits. Read some of the emails here.

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