Betsy Kaplan

Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were using strategies to deliberately divide America's political system decades before the pivotal 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush divided us into gangs of  'red' or 'blue.'

Today, we've booked no guests. It's Colin and your calls. 

Saturday's confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was the anticlimatic coda to a nomination that has both riveted and more deeply divided our country.

Depending on your view, the Kavanaugh confirmation either endangers the legitimacy of the court or is a welcome culmination to a decades-long effort to capture a solid conservative majority on the high court.

The Eagles' first album touched a cultural nerve in 1971, with songs like "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and "Witchy Woman." And the hits never stopped. Despite mounting criticism from critics and fans alike, within five years they rolled those hits into one of the biggest selling Greatest Hits albums of all time. 

A lot of you reading this are familiar with the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder because you watched the popular "Little House on the Prairie" television show that ran from 1974-1983.

But the television show came long after Laura Ingalls Wilder began sharing the story of her family's journey through the open frontier. She shared her memories in a series of beloved Little House books that spanned a life of pioneering both before and after the government declared the frontier closed. She speaks in simple and intimate prose of everyday life that fascinated millions of young readers who wanted to live like Laura. Fans today still want to believe in the absolute truth of every word. 

Like many Americans, our newsroom was glued to the eight or so hours of testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh during last week's Senate Judiciary Hearings, including the dramatic committee vote on Friday that led to a limited FBI investigation. 

Joyce Maynard has been writing for over 45 years about the kind of human experiences we're often taught to keep hidden - stories  about envy, anger, vanity, self-pity, pride.  

We read her stories because they offer a chance to first confront and then forgive ourselves for how those emotions can shape us into people we don't like. 

The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the seat of departing Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy had already widened the chasm between Democrats and Republicans before allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh blew it wide open. 

We were going to produce a show today on loneliness with British writer Olivia Laing. We still want to do that show with Olivia - but not today.

Instead, we decided to switch gears and talk with Olivia and other artists about the themes in Olivia's new novel because they mirror our own concerns: how to live life in this fast-moving world where the present is history in the blink of an eye and world leaders can end our world with one wrong tweet? How can we exist, create art, raise children, commit to a future in a world that could be ending?

Today, we have no guests. We want to hear from you. We canceled our previously planned show so we could dedicate the entire hour to understanding how you are feeling about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the  Supreme Court.

Nearly ninety-percent of Americans own a smartphone.

On average, we spend more than four hours a day on our phones, which adds up to about 56 full days a year. That's like sealing yourself in a room on the first day of summer and not emerging until the kids head back to school. 

After Naomi Osaka won the first set against Serena Williams during Saturday's U.S. Open Women's Final, chair umpire Carlos Ramos gave Williams a warning for receiving help from her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, who was sitting in the stands. She asked Ramos to take it back. She told him she doesn't cheat. Ramos didn't take it back. After that, it got ugly.

Nike is catching a lot of press for selecting former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick as the face of a new "Just Do It" ad campaign. 

Former Trump official Steve Bannon was disinvited from the 19th annual "New Yorker Festival" Monday, after David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, first invited him for a "serious" and "combative" conversation in which Remnick promised to pose "difficult" questions to Bannon. 

Nobody likes the termite. They get into the wood in our homes that can lead to infuriating and expensive repairs. What's to like.

It turns out, there's a lot to like about the termite; scientists study how termites build their "mounds" for clues to solving some of the world's most pressing problems, like mitigating the effects of drought, building colonies on Mars, and the creation of biofuels.