Net Gains

Guest host Chris Bannon fills in today for Leonard. This week our “Underreported” segment focuses on Georgia’s internal struggles, and its efforts to regain some of its lost territories. We’ll hear from Andrew Meier, author of Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall, and Sebastian Smith, journalist and author of Allah's Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus. Then Joshua Goldstein argues that war is (and should be) expensive—he estimates that the average American household currently pays $500 each month in taxes to finance war. And these costs only increase the longer war lasts. In The Real Price of War, he argues that increasing war spending now will actually save money later. Bruce Schoenfeld has won two Emmy Awards for his coverage of the Olympics. In his latest book, The Match, he uncovers the historic significance of the friendship between tennis doubles partners Althea Gibson (the first black person to compete in the US Championships) and Angela Buxton (who, as the granddaughter of Russian Jews growing up in England, felt like an outsider herself) in the 1950s. We’ll talk with both Bruce Schoenfeld and Angela Buxton about this important partnership. Finally, director Bill Morrison and composer Michael Gordon discuss their current work, Decasia. The project—currently showing at St. Ann’s Warehouse—combines Morrison’s assemblage of deteriorated, damaged film clips with Gordon’s original score in order to examine the nature of decay.