Less than a week before the election, many observers across the political spectrum say that they believe a victory for President Obama is highly likely. Others say that it's reckless to predict the future with any kind of certainty. Nate Silver of the New York Times FiveThirtyEight blog explains to Brooke the difference between forecasting and fortune-telling, and defends his belief that an Obama win seems probable. 

Grizzly Bear & Feist - Service Bell

The 24-hour news cycle and social media provided consumers with up to the minute images and information about the toll of Sandy. Too bad some of those images and information were both woefully incorrect and deliberately misleading. Brooke and Bob talk to the New Jersey Record's John Brennan and Salon's Laura Miller about how disasters plunge us into a media mix of the real, the unreal, and the unknown.

Cody Wilson, who leads Defense Distributed, is working on an open-source schematic that will let people print out a plastic pistol at home using a 3D-printer. Wilson talks to Bob about his project, and explains why he's not worried the guns will fall into the wrong hands.

The United States once led the world in internet speed and infrastructure. Now, according to one estimate, it ranks at about 29. Brooke talks to David Cay Johnston, journalist and author of The Fine Print: How big companies use plain english to rob you blind, who says that companies continue to raise prices and engage in lobbying efforts to rewrite regulation, while avoiding necessary upgrades to infrastructure that would speed up America's internet.

Menahan Street Band - The Crossing

A few weeks ago, Brooke asked listeners to visit our Media Scrutiny Theater website, and gave the address with a "backslash", a mistake that turned out to be like nails on a chalk board for some of our listeners. OTM's acting Senior Producer Jamie York asks for your forgiveness, and vows to do better. 

The Walkmen - Flamingos (For Colbert)

The Facebook "Like" button has ventured beyond the pages of Facebook. Now, not only can you tell your friends that you "Like" their comments, photos and status updates, you can also tell third-party site how much you "Like" a blog post or news article. Bob explores the meaning of a Facebook "Like."

As popular as Facebook is, it has its share of detractors, especially among public intellectuals. Novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke for many when he said that platforms like Facebook are “great allies and enablers of narcissism" and that "to friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.” Where’s this frustration coming from? Is it fair? Writer Paul Ford talks to Brooke about an essay he wrote last year that sought to answer that question.

Not long ago, writer Emily McCombs received a friend request from a man who had raped her in her adolescence. She talks to Brooke about how you handle that particular social networking quandary, and about how the interaction was ultimately a surprisingly positive one for her.

Sigur Rós - Flugufrelsarinn (performed by Kronos Quartet)

It’s easy to forget that Facebook has only been around for eight years. In that time, Facebook’s grown from a college dorm room project to a multi-billion dollar company, and made its 27 year-old founder the 4th richest person in the United States. But Facebook’s life represents an eternity in internet years, where sites live, dominate and die at historic speeds. Surely, then, Facebook must one day die, right? According to Clay Shirky, no one ought to hold their breath waiting for Facebook's demise.

Bangs - Meet Me On Facebook

Writer Rebecca MacKinnon has compared Facebook to a country, she calls it Facebookistan. Facebookistan has 1 billion people, and an economy that rivals many countries'. Brooke and Bob talk to Jillian York and Clay Shirky about the contours of Facebookistan, and how it affects life in the actual world we live in.

Don & Juan - What’s Your Name

In 2010, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution were brought in by BP to help advise. But after the US government sued BP, the company went after the Institution, subpoenaeing private correspondence and other documents on top of the 50,000 documents that the WHOI had supplied voluntarily. Brooke talks to Richard Camilli, an oceanographer at the WHOI, who says he believes this kind of request can compromise independent scientific inquiry.

Califone - Burned by the Christians

We've inherited a myth from the Cuban Missile Crisis that compromise is for the weak, a myth that’s long been contradicted by the facts. And yet it still casts a long dark shadow over the policy-makers in Washington, according to recent issues of both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines. Brooke speaks with Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He says he had first-hand experience with the cherished notion that America's strength lies in rigidity.

Jenny Scheinman - A Ride with Polly Jean

It's the home stretch for the Presidential campaigns and the fact-checkers that follow on their heels. Recently, Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, FactCheck.org and Flackcheck.org wrote an Op-Ed praising the TV fact-checkers in Denver for a job well-done fact-checking political ads in their crucial swing state. Brooke spoke with Jamieson who says that when it comes to fact-checking, execution matters.

Explosions in the Sky - First Breath After A Coma

The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the most politically tense moments of the Kennedy presidency, and one of the most memorable media moments of the Cold War. In an interview which originally aired in 2002, Fred Kaplan talks about how the media covered the crisis then, and how that coverage led to people drawing the wrong lessons from the crisis.

Bauhaus - Bela Legosi's Dead

The widespread media coverage of Taliban shooting victim Malala Yousafzai seems to have come as a surprise to the Taliban, who are claiming the media are biased against them.  Brooke speaks to Pakistani journalist Mushtaq Yusufzai, who says the Taliban are planning attacks on journalists because they feel the media are ruining their reputation.

Andrew Pekler - Here Comes the Night

Lee Atwater became one of the most complicated and successful Republican political operatives in history by employing a triple threat: spin when you can, change the subject when you can’t, and if all else fails, appeal to the voters’ resentment and fear, usually of African-Americans. In this conversation from 2008, Brooke talks to Stefan Forbes, director of "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story", about the dark legacy of Atwater’s Southern strategy.

Kenneth Sandford - When All Night Long a Chap Remains

We may think we know all about how we make decisions, but when it comes to political choices, they can hinge on a number of factors that we rarely notice. Brooke speaks with political psychologists and scientists to get to the bottom of why we make the choices we do at election time.

The way campaigns are run is changing rapidly and it's up to reporters to catch up. OTM producers PJ Vogt and Chris Neary talk about what the modern campaign looks like from the inside with Sasha Issenberg, author of the book Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. You'll also hear from political consultant Hal Malchow and Columbia Professor Don Green - each of whom helped change the way campaigns are run.

Bert Jansch - High Days

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said in Wednesday's debate that, if elected, he'd end the use of taxpayer money to support public media. Should we? In 2010, Reason.com editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie told Brooke that yes, we should. On the other side, New Yorker editor Steve Coll told Bob why public radio should continue to receive some taxpayer support.  

Emiliana Torrini - Gun

Sixty-eight years ago Upton Sinclair, muckraking journalist and erstwhile socialist, won the primary for the governorship of California by a landslide. The response from the state's newspapers and the motion picture industry was swift and merciless: they used every trick they could think of to defeat him. In 2010, Brooke spoke to Greg Mitchell, author of The Campaign of the Century, who argued that, for better or worse, the anti-Sinclair effort ushered in the modern political campaign.

Radio Citizen - The Hop