Alec Klein went to a high school better than yours. Every year, 28,000 kids apply to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, and only 850 are accepted. Among those that do make it, there is a 25% acceptance rate to Ivy League schools. The alumni include Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and business luminaries. Stuyvesant kids are far smarter, wittier, more successful and maybe even prettier than those that went to your high school.

But Alec Klein wants to know the reasons why? He graduated in the class of 1985, and now he has gone back to try and figure out what makes his school so special. His book, A Class Apart, follows several students — the ten-year-old prodigy, the captain of the football team, the jaded poet — and several faculty members through a year at “Sty High”, and finds in equal parts the fulfillment of the American dream and vicious educational elitism.

Klein was featured on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday. Check out the interview.

Imagine a world without human beings.

The tag line to the latest Omega Man remake? Hardly. Rather, its the premise of journalist Alan Weisman’s newest book, The World Without Us, an examination of what might happen if the strain of humanity was taken off the earth. For instance, in days’ time, the pumps that keep our subways dry would fail, flood, and begin eroding underground construction. In a year’s time, millions more birds will exist in a world without airplanes. In twenty years’ time, the steel beams that support New York’s East Side would buckle and break. As Lexington Ave. collapses, it would become a river. Our plastic would exist long after everything else. Our radio signals, however broken, would be emitted forever.

The book is full of juicy factoids like those, but Weisman also takes a look at parts of the world untouched by human hands — Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the old-growth forests of Poland — and uses those environments to further inform his post-apocalyptic vision.

But Jon Stewart makes it all funny. Watch the Daily Show interview.

We live in an age where everything is fluid, most of all moral standards. They’re often the focal point of politicians’ stump speeches, but these past six years have seen some atrocious acts dismissed, talked around, justified and flat out ignored. In a country where our founding document, which guarantees us certain rights and protections, is being ignored as often as it is evoked, how are we supposed to interpret the term “civil liberties”?

American Civil Liberties Executive Director Anthony Romero sets out to answer that question in In Defense of Our America. He takes a look at several post-9/11 civil liberties cases — the Guantanamo Bay issue, the NSA spying program, the “American Taliban” — and examines their importance in the larger civil rights battle.

Romero appeared on Diane Rehm yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

Quick, what’s the hip, new, rebellious thing amongst teenage girls today? Being good! What would Paris and Lindsey think?

Those two are actually major catalysts for the movement, which has been profiled by Wendy Shalit in her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. Girls across the country are boycotting barely-there clothing from companies like Hollister and Icing. A girl in Philadelphia is upset by a profane book read in English class, so she takes her case to the school board. In a blog, another girl details a struggle she’s having with her mother, who she feels is pressuring her to lose her virginity. Shalit argues that these aren’t just isolated incidents, but rather a reaction to the hyper-sexualized teenagers on TV and in movies. She describes how the primarily the media, but also friends and, surprisingly, parents can derail a girl’s efforts to discover herself, and outlines specific cases in which teenage girls have resisted all of that and become who they want to be.

Shalit spoke with Diane Rehm yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

Well, maybe not you, but Daniel Smith’s father. He heard voices. Nothing quite so dramatic as say, Joan of Arc, just simple things. “Move that cup,” for instance. Smith says he led a normal life as an attorney, but for many years felt deeply ashamed by these voices, so much so that he never told anyone outside the family about them.

It was his father that led Smith to write Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination. The author sat down with Stephen Colbert, during which time he said “over the past 100 years, hearing voices has been traditionally associated with mental illness…a symptom of schizophrenia.” But it hasn’t always been like that. “Hearing voices certainly has not always been easy, but also not always thought of in terms of mental illness…[but instead] in terms of poetry, or religion.” Smith noted some famous figures throughout history that have heard voices, the most famous being Moses and his burning bush, and the most amusing being Socrates, who heard a voice warning him that the street he was traveling on was full of muddy pigs, and that he should seek out a different route.

Watch the full interview, in which Smith points out two-thirds of Americans admit to hearing voices. Colbert counters with the fact that his fans hear his voice even when the TV is off.

With The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, Allen Brandt, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, offers up the definitive history of the cigarette, from its inception in the late 19th century to its widespread ban in the late 20th. Thursday night, Brandt sat down with Jon Stewart and argued that cigarettes represent nearly every aspect of America: agriculture, business, pop culture, issues of gender and sexuality, advertising, public relations and so on.

In his book, Brandt documents the knowledge that cigarettes are harmful in great detail, but that there is no sense of shame or acknowledgment on the part of cigarette companies, who still go after what they call “replacement smokers,” kids that they lure in with newly reissued flavored cigarettes and tobacco.

Watch the whole interview, in which Brandt puts forth his theory on how cigarettes have remained popular for over a century.

In 2004, NPR correspondent Rob Gifford traveled across China, following a single highway, Route 312, west from Shanghai for nearly 3,000 miles. He observed the booming economy behind China’s rise to power, but also discovered overwhelming poverty and numerous other things that could undermine the country’s new-found role on the world stage. Part On the Road, part brilliant social commentary, his observations, originally a seven-part series on NPR, have been collected here in China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.

Gifford spoke with NPR’s Steve Inskeep late last month: “I’d just get on a bus, and you just find the four people sitting around you all have amazing stories about their life in the countryside or their life in the city. You know, everywhere you go, you just ask the people, ‘What are you doing? What’s your life like?’ And they just want to talk about it, and that’s really what the book is.”

Gifford stopped by The Diane Rehm Show earlier today, during which time he presented a mixture of humorous travel stories with his larger theories on the social and economic progressions of one of the most important countries in the world. Listen to the interview here and read the NPR article and excerpt here.

His mother must love him: Pete Jordon found his calling some 12 years ago as a (drumroll)…dishwasher! He was, in fact, so enthusiastic about it that he set out to wash in all 50 states, chronicling his journey both in magazine articles and segments for NPR’s This American Life. He’s now consolidated his efforts into a book, Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States, which takes the American infatuation with bad people in kitchens (don’t tell me you haven’t watched Hell’s Kitchen!) to a whole new place, which Jordon describes as “the heart of the kitchen…the dish pit!”

Think very carefully if you plan on eating out again and then listen to Jordon’s interview with Michele Norris, in which he discusses the vermin he shares the Dish Pit with, a Chinese restaurant in which the owner insisted washing water glasses was a waste of time, and the inherent racism in the New Orleans’ dish-washing scene.

According to The Journey to Parenthood: Myths, Reality and What Really Matters, the newest parenting manual by Diana Lynn Barnes and Leigh Balber, it’s OK to not be blindly enthused about the stork pecking down your door. In fact, it’s even OK to resent the change a bit. Other people do, even if they don’t admit it. This is what Barnes and Balber set out to explore the gap between what new parents say they think and what they actually think. It is wider than you might believe.

Read the excerpt posted today on the Early Show Website and take solace.

There is also an interview with Barnes, available here.

In his book, Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Vanity Fair Editor Cullen Murphy asks, well, are we Rome?

The comparison of the U.S. and the fallen empire is a popular one in modern times, especially since the onset of the Iraq war, when the country began to experience many of the issues that Rome did during its demise. In an interview with Colbert, who was channeling Russel Crowe, Murphy pointed to “the hollowing out” of government, the imminent corruption that makes citizens lose faith in their central institution. He also discussed our military problems, which echo Rome’s in that our forces are too small to do the jobs we need done, but still too large for us to adequately maintain, which will inevitably lead to a break down abroad. And like Rome, the U.S. has exacerbated the issue, Murphy says, by inviting in outsiders, “barbarians,” to do our dirty work, the most well known of these being Halliburton.

The similarities go on, but Murphy ends the interview on a good note saying he feels it will be largely impossible for Bush to get himself elected Emperor.

Colbert: “So he’s totally going to get stabbed, huh?”

Watch the interview.