The Lowdown with Ira Wood on WOMR-FM

When I was a kid, every spring we took a family vacation and on every one of those long and tedious drives my father would pull over at every commemorative plaque we passed along the highway and repeat the same lame joke: “Hey, look. Another Hysterical Marker.” In retrospect, every one of them marked the site of a battle or skirmish where people lost their lives; or a stop along the Underground Railroad; or a bloody labor battle. And yet they meant little more to us than a place to have lunch or stretch our legs or pee. And so it is with many monuments: great warriors on rearing horses; brass bas reliefs of marching soldiers; statues, plaques, obelisks. No matter how much death or suffering or historical significance they’re built to honor, monuments are barely noticed and often ignored.As Veteran's Day approaches, we’re talking about why we these efforts at remembrance are dead to us and how to bring our sense of history to the present. Ira's guest is Howard Mansfield, an award-winning essayist and the author of a dozen books. Today we’re talking about latest, Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past.

Here in the United States, we spend more on health care than anywhere else in the world and get some of the worse results, which is astonishing for a country known for its medical innovation. So, the question is why. Why is it so hard to find a primary care doctor? Why are health insurance premiums so high and why do they deny coverage that doctors deemed necessary? Why do drugs cost an arm and a leg? Why do we have to wait months for appointments? And why is it next to impossible to get a human on the phone? That was a puzzle that Harvard School of Public Health professor John E. McDonough set out to answer set out to answer. In his new book, America's Wrong Turn he explains that it all comes down to an economic and political philosophy adopted by both Republicans and Democrats. It’s called neo-liberalism, a system in which the market is viewed not just as a tool for trading goods, but as an omniscient, self-regulating system that processes human needs better than any government ever could.

Roughly half of American households have at least one dog. And the bond goes back a long way, evidence suggesting that dogs were viewed as family members even before the dawn of agriculture. And why not? Dogs keep us company, ease our stress, watch over the house, and give us the kind of support that never judges. But how well do we really know them? How much of what we see is the dog, and how much is just us, reading our own feelings into them? What's actually going on in those heads? And what can we do we to get through to them? Today we’re talking to Jen Golbeck, a Professor at the University of Maryland who studies some of the darker corners of the digital world but in another life is known as "the internet's dog mom." She rescues senior and special-needs golden retrievers and six of them live with her right now. She's written four books and her latest is "Think Like a Dog: How Positive Psychology Can Help Your Dog Thrive."

The idea of achieving personal happiness is big business. Books, podcasts, TV shows, workshops, health clubs, and drugs, all purporting to enable us to experience a baseline of perpetual bliss are selling one of the most persistent illusions of modern culture. In reality, biological evolution and scientific research have shown that humans were never designed to be happy all the time. Our brains developed, instead, to keep us alive and reproducing and those terrible emotional swings we all sometimes endure—anxiety, fear, sadness, and loneliness—serve to help us avoid potential threats and recalibrate our mistakes. If our ancestors felt completely satisfied and happy all the time, they’d lose the motivation to hunt, gather, build shelter, and create the relationships with other humans that kept them alive. We may not like them. We may beat ourselves up for having them. We may spend lots of money avoiding them. In his book The Opposite of Happiness, Professor George Loewenstein, a founding father of behavioral economics, explains why negative emotions play an important role in our lives.

With the daily avalanche of headlines, alerts and updates, it’s never been harder to know or easier to doubt the what’s real. And that’s no accident. For over a hundred years, big industry has been trying to shape modern culture, diet, healthcare, and consumer habits by altering public perception, often without the public realizing a campaign is even taking place. Whether its calling climate change a hoax, pushing a war to save us from weapons of mass destruction, or trotting out bogus experts to question the link between smoking and lung cancer, it’s all a part of a polluted information eco-system created by PR firms, think tanks, lobbyists, and university research. Award-winning journalist lays it all out in our discussion of her book Brought to You By.