Equal Rights Amendment 40 Years Too Late? (0:33)

Guest: Martha Davis, Professor of Law, Northeastern University

It takes 38 states to ratify a change to the US Constitution and as of last month, 38 states have now ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. Virginia’s state legislature pushed the ERA over the threshold. The trouble is the deadline to reach that milestone expired 38 years ago. But the US House of Representatives is about to pass a resolution removing that deadline. The US Senate is less likely to get on board with it. Why are we still talking about the Equal Rights Amendment, anyway? Haven’t men and women gained equal protection under the law and Supreme Court rulings?

There & Back Again: A Hobo’s Tale (19:07)

Guest: Graham Stinnett, Archivist, University of Connecticut Library

If you were a hobo 150 years ago, that didn’t mean you were in poverty. It meant you were a wanderer. Hopping from train to train, homeless by choice. One famous hobo warned others with this: “Do not jump on moving trains or streetcars, even if only to ride to the next street crossing, because this might arouse the ‘wanderlust,’ besides endangering needlessly your life and limbs.”

The Tolkien Heir and His Legacy (35:23)

Guest: Corey Olsen, President, Signum University

JRR Tolkien’s epic stories of hobbits and elves and great battles between good and evil made fantasy the literary genre it is today. The Lord of the Rings was published more than 60 years ago. The Hobbit came out 30 years before that. And Tolkien himself died in 1973. How have his stories of Middle Earth continued to captivate so many new generations? Christopher Tolkien gets the credit for that. He was J.R.R. Tolkien’s third and youngest son and just recently passed at the age of 95.

Carol Kaye – Music’s Hit-Making Bass Player of the 1960s (50:05)

Guest: Carol Kaye, Guitar and Bass Player, Top Studio Recording Musician

Tune your record player back to the big hits of the 1960s and 70s. From Ray Charles to Glen Campbell to The Beach Boys – they all owe a debt to one woman and her bass. Carol Kaye was the studio musician every producer wanted on bass when it came to recording albums, TV show theme songs, even movie scores. I mean really she is everywhere in the sound of those decades. Carol Kaye is sometimes called The First Lady of Bass, but she never referred to herself as a “woman bass player. “Men don’t say, ‘I’m a man bass player,’” she says. “You either play or you don’t.” But she was a trailblazer and she’s inspired generations of bass players.