John Hockenberry

The Takeaway’s co-host John Hockenberry reacts to today’s discussion of the Oslo terrorist attacks that took place on Friday. With nearly one hundred dead and the same number injured, Hockenberry questions the role of the internet in either fueling or deflating the hunger for violence in extremists such as Anders Behring Breivik, the confessed-suspect of the attacks. Does the passivity of the internet allow extremists to follow an easier path to violence? Hockenberry discusses this and freedom of assembly and expression in the digital age.

We're putting forward a new feature: quick videos with hosts after the show. In today's episode, John Hockenberry reacts to some of the morning's best segments, talking about the importance of language, his idea for an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and his wish: to retire the use of "lame" in the modern lexicon. 

My heritage, folks, relatives, DNA connection to America, call it what you will, has been kicking around this continent since the 1600s. My mom’s side of the family is descended from one of the original Dutch settlers in New York. The Stryker family founded a Dutch Reformed Church on Long Island and for years there was a “Stryker Mansion” on the woody, wilderness edge of Manhattan’s West Side.

The Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 that a California law restricting the purchase of violent videogames by minors represents a breach of their First Amendment rights. Members of the U.S. media elite know that the impetus for this decision is most likely the fact that the current Court is packed with videogame-ophiles.

As we witness the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan, with the President’s outline of a troop drawdown and our continuing responsibilities in that country I have been taking stock of the notion of endings and beginnings as applied to warfare.

The astounding crash and burn story of Congressman Anthony Weiner is as tired, tawdry and old as the primitive brainstem impulses that brought it about. It is also a story unimaginable outside of the digital age. The blurty, disruptive Tweets and urges to snap a picture and construct an unintentional global billboard don’t go anywhere without the Internet. The endocrine waste of an unrestrained Id can’t become a national political obsession without the enabling technology of digital cameras that fit on the heads of pins more comfortably than angels in another age. Impulses become objects. The objects abruptly acquire a meaning even as they lose their original context. You might say that, “In the present everything will be meaningful for 15 minutes and exist online forever.” (Andy Warhol just tweeted that to me.)

Before she was the definition of celebrity, she was the face of movie stardom. And in the beginning the personalification of girlhood. In "National Velvet", she was the face of a dream of winning.

Liz Taylor died today in Los Angeles after a long period of declining health. She was 79 and the cause of death was reported to be complications of heart failure. Taylor had a kind of vulnerable brilliance that she brought to everything she did. And yet unlike Judy Garland, Francis Farmer or other starlets of her generation who died in their primes, Taylor survived.

Caravaggio: The Complete Paintings

—Sebastian Schutze

This is an unbelievably beautiful book that allows you to dive into the work of a mysterious genius and travel back in time. One of the most beautiful art books I have ever seen.

Richard Holbrooke, the United States Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed away yesterday after undergoing a marathon surgery that failed to save his life. He was 69. Across a long career in foreign policy, Holbrooke dedicated his life to brokering peace and stability throughout the world on behalf of the United States.

We've been asking listeners to use the new Takeaway iPhone app and call in to tell us about their idea of home. You've been sending the sound and pictures of the things that make a place a home for you. Here are the voices behind two of those photos: Alexandra Haller from Northville, Mich. and Danielle Sager from Colorado Springs.

This week as we contemplate the holidays we've all been thinking about home. What is it? Where is it? We've been getting a lot of examples from you, and every one of them makes me think, how would I answer that question?

In my home, a big old 110-year-old house my wife and I have had for almost as long as we've been married, the piano is the center, where you can hear folks playing away on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

We got to the theater at 11:43 and a large shivering line of Muggles was already waiting for a chance to see the half dozen “midnight” shows of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1." There were Harrys, and Hermiones, and Ron Weasleys in full regalia. Fans fully decked out in Hogwarts uniforms and round rimmed glasses were everywhere.

Thinking about the Detroit Opera company trying to survive Detroit’s economic woes, it certainly seems that the abandoned buildings and tragic urban landscape of parts of Detroit  provide that city with an opportunity for theater at the very least.

The stark triumph (or not so much) over adversity themes in "La Boheme" ought to make it a Motown fave given the economy. You could stage it in some of Detroit's most troubled neighborhoods. "Boheme" is obvious though, so why not imagine other stories of operas starring some of the fallen, or embracing some of the narratives in the motor city? You’ve got discredited mayor Kwame Kilpatrick as Lt. Pinkerton in "Madame Butterfly" leaving Detroit in the lurch. GM would be perfect as suicidal "Tosca," or evil "Don Giovanni." Ford is clearly "The Magic Flute" in this narrative… you could imagine Andre Chenier for Alan Mulally over at Ford but then he doesn’t climb the scaffold in the end.

Procrastination, thy name is journalism.

In my case, procrastination is a series of behavior patterns that end up delaying important things getting done. It’s been proven again and again that for me, deadline pressure is the fuel that gets the engine to crank. Closer to the deadline, more fuel apparently. The orderly to-do list that looks completely efficient and rational on Monday morning, by Friday, is just some bizarre Magritte painting of an alternate reality. Schedules are better managed moment to moment in the real world. Things get pushed off because reality intervenes. Flexibility-nation not Procrasta-nation. I know which flag I wave.

The full interview of John Hockenberry's talk with Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the MIT Media Lab 25th Anniversary celebration.

John is broadcasting from our partner station, WGBH, in Boston today. He's there to take part in the celebrations surrounding the 25th anniversary of the MIT Media Lab. 

Over the years a long list of new computer and digital technologies were developed there. Since then the lab has also become hugely prolific developer of medical technologies. Researchers at the lab have worked on projects as abstract as figuring out how to improve health care record keeping and as concrete as how to hybridize robotic technologies with prosthetics to improve the lives of veterans and civilians who've lost limbs.

The MIT Media Lab turns 25 today. We take a look back at the novel idea behind this multidisciplinary academic lab that harnessed (and continues to harness) the creative energy of the digital revolution to develop major innovations in art and design, IT and mass communications. The display behind e-book readers such as the Kindle and Nook, the innovation behind the wildly popular "Guitar Hero" video games, and the "One Laptop Per Child" initiative all came from the Media Lab.

Why Mark Zuckerberg's has yet to be told —

The both preposterous and completely unsurprising bio-flick, “Social Network,” about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s both preposterous and completely unsurprising 21^st century life, is both sociology and entertainment. Zuckerberg is 26 and the looming question has to be who cares about the biography of a 26-year-old? 

It’s taken me a while to get around to writing this because, as the listener comments and pictures about the symbols of being (or not being) in the middle class have proliferated, I have thought more about how much of a big deal this was in my childhood back in the ancient 60s. As a little kid, I was constantly comparing myself with my neighbor kid pals to see who was ahead of whom in the inevitable pecking order of the American post-war economy.

America invented the middle class. Europe invented the working class. The differences explain practically everything about why politics in America barely resembles politics and parties across the Atlantic.

The industrial revolutions in Europe took place against a background of the aristocratic traditions of class, rank, and royalty.  The growing wealth of the working classes produced a constituency allied against the upper ranks. The working class did not wish to be merely included in some political food-chain along with the aristocracy: It competed with the vestiges of royalty for political power. Aristocratic politics were expressed in the language of the Tories. The working classes were the Labor party or the socialists and communists.