This week we're talking with the soldier turned writer Andrew Bacevich, and then the jazz piano star Vijay Iyer. All they share is eloquent originality on American-ness in a changing world. Andrew Bacevich was an Army officer from West Point who writes now on the Washington Rules of American warfare... without end: the lessons we didn't learn from Vietnam, and probably won't learn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Then "a bit of grace in the midst of fire," as Vijay Iyer describes music. A child of Indian immigrants in Rochester, New York, Iyer pulls from American pop and takes Thelonious Monk as his model.

V.S. Naipaul--the Nobel laureate of "gloomy clarity"--joins us to talk about his new book The Masque of Africa. But first, we're looking at Tea Party tax rebellions then and now, with the very hip, modern historian of the 18th century American Revolution, Jill Lepore. Is history repeating itself in this Election 2010 revolt against Obamacare and the rest? Are we perhaps just looking at a reenactment party in periwigs and tri-cornered hats? What does a historian make of the real discontents in our country this fall?

Noam Chomsky is the closest thing we have to Socrates in the American public square--a scathing questioner of virtually every common premise about who we are as Americans and what we're up to in the world. He's on an upbeat, though, about the country's attitudes about war and imperialism.

And then, another inquisitor of the American landscape: the poet C.D. Wright. She says as soon as the Vietnam War started and she "got a hold of Chomsky," she was a goner. C.D. Wright speaks of her own output as "a few reams of freedom." Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. "Of the choices revealed to me," she has written, "crime and art were the only ones with any real sex appeal."

How is it that esteemed practices like English dueling on points of honor, or the binding of Chinese women's feet, or slavery for that matter, suddenly collapse under ridicule? Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosopher at Princeton University, thinks he's found the recipe for defeating immoral practices, and in this age of mega-wealth and permanent war, it's in our interests to apply it. His book is The Honor Code.

Also from Princeton, our poetry guest is the lavishly decorated C.K. Williams. His own newest book of poems is titled Wait, but we're here to talk about another little book of his called On Whitman. it's a conversation on Walt Whitman's music, his vision of America--all of it fresh and urgent in every reading.

Isabel Wilkerson is the epic tale teller of the Great Migration of Southern black people that remade America — sound, substance and spirit — in the 20th Century. The proof is in the soundtrack — musical highlights of a comprehensive revolution. It was one of two modern migrations, it’s been said, that made American culture what it is — of blacks from the Jim Crow South, and of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.

The movement of masses is an ageless, ongoing piece of human history. But was there ever a migration that beyond moving people transformed a national culture as ours did? Songs, games, language, art, style, worship, every kind of entertainment including pro sports — in fact almost all we feel about ourselves, how we look to the world, changed in the sweep of Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificent story, the Warmth of Other Suns. 

The first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was assassinated 50 years ago this January. Howard French of the New York Times covered the carnage in Congo known as Africa's World War--one of the most destructive wars in modern history. French returns to Africa now with an upcoming book about the emerging business class of Chinese migrants to places like Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Liberia. It's not colonialism, but will the story end happily for the Africans?

Then we sit with Lydia Davis, the fiction miniaturist who keeps popping up in conversation as a favorite writer of our favorite writers. A Lydia Davis story can be as short as a few phrases. Each is evidence of a mind on fire and a gift for sentences that go off like little rockets.

Even as we watched transfixed as the protests in Egypt and Tunisia push the region's political scene into new waters, Nir Rosen is focused on the ongoing, ever-imperative stories of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he's doing the difficult work to get them right. The independent journalist Nir Rosen hits the street with an ability to relay a country's human textures on the receiving end of American military influence.

Then Marianne Leone Cooper of Soprano's fame proves herself as a writer, with Knowing Jesse. It's a book to ambush the heart and feed our neglected hunger for a humanistic revival, and to challenge our notions of disability.

Elliott Colla is tuning in on the poetry of revolution in Egypt. His memo for the next explosion: take the pulse of the poets and pop musicians to feel this moment, and read the novels for after-analysis. 

Jaimy Gordon won the National Book Award for her gorgeous racetrack novel, Lord of Misrule, in a classic dark horse moment.