Brooke Gladstone

Texas' biggest daily newspaper, The Houston Chronicle, has just closed down its long-standing bureau in Mexico City. Brooke speaks to the former head of the bureau, Dudley Althaus, about what is lost when regional papers shut down their foreign bureaus, and the important relationship between Texas and Mexico.

Los Lobos - El Canelo

Privacy is among the many issues raised by the Petraeus affair. We don’t know exactly what the FBI did, or what sort of legal barriers they had to surmount to get access. Reporter Peter Maass wrote that an unexpected consequence of Petreaus’s fall is that we all might learn a little more about how the FBI operates. Brooke spoke with Maass about an unlikely connection between the Petraeus scandal and former Supreme Court Nominee Robert Bork. 

Johan Borger - Goodnight My Friend

Ten years ago, Mexico passed some of the best freedom of information laws in the world. But while the laws are great on paper, their implementation has been problematic. Brooke travels to Mexico City to learn more about why Mexico's sunshine laws still struggle to illuminate information for the public.

Los Lobos - La Iguana

With one term down and one more to go, we take a look at how well the first Obama administration did on some of the issues OTM cares about most: surveillance, transparency, whistleblowers, and press access. Brooke and Bob speak with The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, the Sunlight Foundation's Lisa Rosenberg, and ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper about Obama's first four years, and what they expect in the next four.

Nathan Salsburg - Eight Belles Dreamt the Devil Was Dead

Election night television coverage used all sorts of high-and-low tech gimmickry to communicate results to viewers. The top of the Empire State Building was lit with climbing red and blue bars as states were called for each candidate, and there were the slick, luminous electoral maps activated by the touch of an anchor’s hand. (No holograms though.) Brooke speaks with journalism professor Ira Chinoy, who says that election night and technology have enjoyed a surprisingly long marriage. 

Election Day saw long lines at the polls and confusion among voters. Why can't we just log on and vote? Brooke speaks to Thad Hall, co-author of Point, Click and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting about why, despite being used in countries like Estonia, online voting won't be a reality in the U.S. anytime soon.

Will Samson - My Broken Mirror

As China's only national TV network, CCTV isn't just the domestic mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party; it's also a global for-profit corporation with over 1.2 billion viewers worldwide. Ying Zhu, a professor at the City University of New York, sits down with Brooke to talk about her groundbreaking new book, Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television.

B. Fleischmann - Lemmings

Last month, Forrester Research reported that people assume they spend less time online than they actually do because the way people understand what it means to be "online" is changing. On the Media producer Alex Goldman talks about our changing relationship with being online and how fiction has imagined us reaching this point for decades. 

Slade - Cum on Feel the Noize

A few weeks ago, Brooke asked listeners to visit our Media Scrutiny Theater website, and gave the address with a "backslash", a mistake that turned out to be like nails on a chalk board for some of our listeners. OTM's acting Senior Producer Jamie York asks for your forgiveness, and vows to do better. 

The Walkmen - Flamingos (For Colbert)

The United States once led the world in internet speed and infrastructure. Now, according to one estimate, it ranks at about 29. Brooke talks to David Cay Johnston, journalist and author of The Fine Print: How big companies use plain english to rob you blind, who says that companies continue to raise prices and engage in lobbying efforts to rewrite regulation, while avoiding necessary upgrades to infrastructure that would speed up America's internet.

Menahan Street Band - The Crossing

Less than a week before the election, many observers across the political spectrum say that they believe a victory for President Obama is highly likely. Others say that it's reckless to predict the future with any kind of certainty. Nate Silver of the New York Times FiveThirtyEight blog explains to Brooke the difference between forecasting and fortune-telling, and defends his belief that an Obama win seems probable. 

Grizzly Bear & Feist - Service Bell

In the latest issue of Superman, Clark Kent quits his job at The Daily Planet while soliloquizing about how poor print journalism has become. Brooke talks to Larry Tye, author of Superman: The High Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero about Clark Kent's history as a journalist, the ethical conundrum of covering his alter-ego, and the Man of Steel's potential future as a blogger.

Adventures of Superman Theme

Cody Wilson, who leads Defense Distributed, is working on an open-source schematic that will let people print out a plastic pistol at home using a 3D-printer. Wilson talks to Bob about his project, and explains why he's not worried the guns will fall into the wrong hands.

The 24-hour news cycle and social media provided consumers with up to the minute images and information about the toll of Sandy. Too bad some of those images and information were both woefully incorrect and deliberately misleading. Brooke and Bob talk to the New Jersey Record's John Brennan and Salon's Laura Miller about how disasters plunge us into a media mix of the real, the unreal, and the unknown.

As popular as Facebook is, it has its share of detractors, especially among public intellectuals. Novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke for many when he said that platforms like Facebook are “great allies and enablers of narcissism" and that "to friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.” Where’s this frustration coming from? Is it fair? Writer Paul Ford talks to Brooke about an essay he wrote last year that sought to answer that question.

The Facebook "Like" button has ventured beyond the pages of Facebook. Now, not only can you tell your friends that you "Like" their comments, photos and status updates, you can also tell third-party site how much you "Like" a blog post or news article. Bob explores the meaning of a Facebook "Like."

Not long ago, writer Emily McCombs received a friend request from a man who had raped her in her adolescence. She talks to Brooke about how you handle that particular social networking quandary, and about how the interaction was ultimately a surprisingly positive one for her.

Sigur Rós - Flugufrelsarinn (performed by Kronos Quartet)

It’s easy to forget that Facebook has only been around for eight years. In that time, Facebook’s grown from a college dorm room project to a multi-billion dollar company, and made its 27 year-old founder the 4th richest person in the United States. But Facebook’s life represents an eternity in internet years, where sites live, dominate and die at historic speeds. Surely, then, Facebook must one day die, right? According to Clay Shirky, no one ought to hold their breath waiting for Facebook's demise.

Bangs - Meet Me On Facebook

Writer Rebecca MacKinnon has compared Facebook to a country, she calls it Facebookistan. Facebookistan has 1 billion people, and an economy that rivals many countries'. Brooke and Bob talk to Jillian York and Clay Shirky about the contours of Facebookistan, and how it affects life in the actual world we live in.

Don & Juan - What’s Your Name

We've inherited a myth from the Cuban Missile Crisis that compromise is for the weak, a myth that’s long been contradicted by the facts. And yet it still casts a long dark shadow over the policy-makers in Washington, according to recent issues of both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines. Brooke speaks with Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He says he had first-hand experience with the cherished notion that America's strength lies in rigidity.

Jenny Scheinman - A Ride with Polly Jean