Episode Details

Original tape date: May 20, 2013.

First aired: May 22, 2013.

After two years of civil war, Syria appears to be breaking apart. Is it too late for the U.S. to play a positive role? Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of “The Indispensable Nation,” joins the program via Skype from Washington, DC. Anthropologist Jonathan Shannon of Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center’s mid-east center is the author of, “A Wintry Day in Damascus.”

A small group of thieves recently drained ATM machines in New York City and elsewhere of $45 million—and carried out the heist with a speed and on a scale experts had never before seen. Guests Ken Citarella and David Britton discuss legal and business responses to a new era in global organized crime. Citarella is an adjunct at New York Law School and Arizona-based Britton is a fraud prevention expert at 41st Para
meter.

This week’s Public Intellectual, our regular series looking at the research impacting our lives, raises questions about the wisdom of home ownership. Via Skype from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, economist and study co-author David Blanchflower reviews the controversial finding: home ownership may destroy jobs, not create them.

And finally, a new book out this month, “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,” prompts a new, uncensored look at the second Iraq War. Guests Michael Kamber and Ashley Gilbertson covered the war for nearly a decade, both, for The New York Times.

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