Guest: John Podesta, Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton (October 1998 to January 2001). He's now the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. His book "The Power of Progress: How America's Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country" came out in August.
Listen Add to Playlist

Forty-four years ago, Maine Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman nominated by either of the major parties for president. A lot has changed since 1964 (the year vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin was born), but some things haven't changed at all.
Listen Add to Playlist

They've made headlines every day this week, but bailouts and financial flameouts are a part of American history. The American colonies were bailed out by the French during the Revolutionary war, and then America bailed out the debt-plagued French king by buying Louisiana from him (so he could pay his war bills). The Takeaway looks at more notable American bailouts.
Listen Add to Playlist

The multibillion-dollar, 17-mile-long, particle-smashing Large Hadron Collider is being hailed as the greatest experiment ever. But ultimately, when you get beyond the Collider's 21st-century bells and whistles, the pursuit of scientific knowledge boils down to the individual mind wrestling with the unknown. The Takeaway looks back at this simpler side of science with Robert P. Crease, the author of "The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science"
Listen Add to Playlist

Last week John McCain shook things up when he chose as his running mate the unknown Alaskan governor Sarah Palin. This week, a number of disclosures raise eyebrows about her candidacy and about how rigorously she was vetted. For a look at past Vice Presidential vetting we talk to Joel Goldstein, law professor at St. Louis University and vice presidency scholar.
Listen Add to Playlist

Read Senior Editor Femi Oke's notes on the series below.

It's been three years since Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast and changed the lives hundreds of thousands of Americans. This week, The Takeaway is talking to some of those people and looking back at the events that followed the storm.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then FEMA director Michael Brown took a beating for his lack of formal emergency management experience. It’s been three years since Brown stepped down as FEMA’s director. But in one way at least, he’s picked up where he left off: Brown now owns a crisis management firm. We check in with Michael Brown about life after Katrina, lessons learned, and how he thinks about that tragic moment now that he has the clarity that often comes with the passing of time.
Listen Add to Playlist

Listen Add to Playlist

For this year’s Emmy’s, the Academy is asking people to vote online for their most memorable television moments – either in comedy or drama. But what about news and other reality TV? At The Takeaway, we’re also head first into news and love these moments, so here’s our own category: most memorable “unscripted” television moments...

When Mark Tribe began teaching at Brown University in 2005, he was struck by the dearth of student protests on campus. A war, a controversial election. But where was the debate? So a year later, as part of an ongoing art project, Tribe began staging speeches from figures of the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era in the same places where their words were originally spoken. Tribe says their rhetoric has great relevance today. This weekend, Tribe oversaw the reenactment of a 1969 speech Angela Davis delivered in West Oakland, California, home of the Black Panthers.
Listen Add to Playlist

Anthrax timeline:

Late September, 2001
First signs
Envelopes containing threatening letters and a grainy brown substance arrive in the offices of ABC, CBS, NBC, and the New York Post.

October 5^th, 2001
A fatality
Robert Stevens, a photo editor for the Florida-based tabloid "The Sun," dies of inhaled, pulmonary anthrax after opening an anthrax letter sent to the paper's office in Boca Raton. He was 63.

October 15^th, 2001
Political targets
A threatening letter containing a purer form of anthrax spores arrive in the offices of Senator Tom Daschle, D-S.D. — a similar letter destined
Listen Add to Playlist

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a brilliant man. By the age of 13, he had written concertos, sonatas, symphonies, a German operetta and an Italian opera. He took Europe by storm and even wrote a requiem, which he intended to commemorate his own death. Today, the music of Mozart is heard in elevators, at a quiet volume. Terrance McKnight, host of WNYC's Evening Music, has been broadcasting from the “Mostly Mozart Festival.”
Listen Add to Playlist

There’s an oil boom in North Dakota, and the wealth under ground is creating millionaires.
Listen Add to Playlist

It's the 50th anniversary of a great proxy battle fought in outer space. In 1958, President Eisenhower created NASA so the United States could compete with the USSR in space technology. Today, there’s a new space race on — between China and America. The finish line, 50 years later, is still the moon.
Listen Add to Playlist

Seventy-five years ago, on July 28, 1933, Sheila Barrett became the first woman to make a national broadcast on BBC Radio. The anniversary got us here at the Takeaway thinking, how have American women shaped the tone and distinction of the radio waves?

With President Bush facing a pile of applications for pardons, The Takeaway goes back to one of the most famous and controversial pardons a president has ever made.
Listen Add to Playlist

John Fox is the most wanted person at the FBI this week. Not because he's a criminal, but because July 26, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of the FBI and he's the Bureau's only historian. If it happened in the FBI, Fox knows about it.
Listen Add to Playlist

This year marks the Los Angeles Dodgers' 50th anniversary in the City of Angels. The architect of the team's move from Brooklyn, Walter O’Malley, will be inducted, posthumously, into the National Baseball Hall of Fame this weekend. New York writer Pete Hamill said O’Malley was the only man Brooklynites hated more than Hitler.
Listen Add to Playlist

Guest: Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, in Paris
Listen Add to Playlist

Listen Add to Playlist

The thing I remember most vividly about beginning my internship at TransAfrica Forum, the foreign policy lobbyist group founded in 1977 to pressure the U.S. Government to do right by Africa and the African Diaspora, was that I didn't want to be there.

As South Africa gears up to toast its favorite citizen, Nelson Mandela, The Takeaway celebrates the former president and anti-apartheid icon on his 90th birthday.
Listen Add to Playlist

Apple’s iPhone 3G goes on sale this morning. This iPod, GPS mapping system and wireless Internet telephone is generating some serious buzz. But is it worth all the hype?
Listen Add to Playlist

Listen Add to Playlist

Guest: Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
Listen Add to Playlist

Americans have widely varying interpretations of the Fourth of July. For some, it’s a day off from work. For others, it’s a sacred day, commemorating the American colonies declaration of independence from England. In one of his famous moments of oratory, former slave Frederick Douglass offered another take: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.” The July 5, 1852, speech was called "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro."
Listen Add to Playlist

Today marks the 60-year anniversary of the Cold War’s first major crisis: The Blockade of Berlin. Angered by an allied plan to reform Germany’s worthless Reichsmark into the Deutschemark, Soviet leader Josef Stalin cut off all roads and railways into West Berlin.
Listen Add to Playlist

Listen Add to Playlist

Listen Add to Playlist