Tuesday, Mar. 23 at 9pm on PBS (Check local listings). Producer Ofra Bikel chronicles the recession's impact on one unlikely neighborhood -- New York's Upper East Side...

Douglas Rushkoff recently spoke at SXSW about crowdsourcing -- a topic he's addressing in this month's Digital Nation roundtable.

There are places in the world where the success of a soap opera is measured not just in TV ratings, but in human lives. NOW travels to Kenya, where ambitious producers and actors hope one such TV show, "The Team", can help foster peace amongst the country's 42 official tribes.

During presidential elections two years ago, tribalism-influenced protests in Kenya left almost 1,500 dead and nearly 300,000 displaced. Tensions continue today over issues including extreme poverty and widespread corruption.

In "The Team", soccer players from different tribes work together to overcome historic rivalries and form a common bond. The hope is that commonalities portrayed in fiction can inspire harmony in the real world. Early reaction to the show's inaugural season is promising.

"I was very surprised to see how Kenyans want change, how they want to live in peace and the way the responded to us," Milly Mugadi, one of the show's stars, noted during a local screening. "There were people from different tribes talking about peace and how to reconcile with each other... they opened up their hearts."

John Marks, whose organization Common Ground produces versions of "The Team" in 12 different countries, is cautiously hopeful. "You don't watch one of our television shows and drop your submachine gun," explains Marks, who says he was inspired by the influence of "All in the Family" on American culture. "But you can change the environment so it becomes more and more difficult to be in violent conflict."

Can this soap opera for social change really make a difference in stopping violence?

(Photo by Robin Holland)

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with famed scientist Jane Goodall, best known for her groundbreaking work with Chimpanzees in Tanzania.

For the past two decades, Goodall has devoted much of her time to environmental advocacy, convincing audiences that saving the wilderness and wild creatures needs to be a priority for all of us, and that individual citizens can make a profound difference. She told Moyers:

"There have been extinctions. The dinosaurs are thought to have been [because of] a meteorite or something. And there've been gradual extinctions, because there have been fluctuations in climate that changes ecosystems and habitats. But since the industrial revolution, our human impact on the planet - our greenhouse gas emissions, our reckless damage to the natural world, the continual growth of our populations, have had a tremendously damaging effect... Wouldn't it be easy just to say, 'Well, it's a trend and it's just happening. The pendulum is swinging. We just better sit back and let it swing. And maybe one day it'll swing back.' If everybody stopped, [if] everybody gave up, then I wouldn't like to think of the world that my great-great-grandchildren would be born into."

What do you think?

How are you and your community helping to preserve the environment?

This week, we take a look back at SXSW and a look forward at New Directors/New Films '10 and the Full Frame Film Festival.

Filmmakers, interactive folks, musicians and more converged on the 2010 South by Southwest Festival this past weekend. POV's interactive director, Theresa Riley, attended the film and interactive portions of the festival, and will be posting about it later today. Blogs All these Wonderful Things and Still in Motion cover the documentary portion of the festival and interviews with many of the filmmakers, including POV alum Monteith McCollum (Hybrid, POV 2002) — whose Notes on Milk premieres with Food, Inc. next month — are up at indieWire.

From March 24 to April 4, New Directors/New Films '10 will be presenting a new line up of fresh faces in New York City. The festival is a co-presentation of the Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center, and among this year's films are a number of documentaries, including three docs forthcoming on POV: Lixin Fan's Last Train Home, which follows one couple in China as they travel home to see their daughter; Robin Hessman's My Perestroika, an exploration of a group of Russians who grew up during the collapse of the Soviet Union; and Laura Poitras' The Oath, which tells the stories of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, a Guantánamo prisoner charged with war crimes. The Oath airs on POV on September 21, 2010. My Perestroika and Last Train Home will premiere on POV in 2011.

Read more after the jump...

Whenever officials of the Islamic Republic start paying too much attention to something it usually means a new fault has been found with the things people enjoy or believe...

Independent journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the world of documentaries in his column, Doc Soup. You can also follow Tom on Twitter @DocSoupMan.

This month, Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, about the cult-fave stand-up comedian and actor, was released on DVD. The documentary explores Izzard's comic talents as well as his upbringing, revealing a very complete portrait of the man. And that's going to mean a lot to some of us who are huge Izzard fans. And it won't mean too much to the rest of us. I have to say I am more in the latter camp: I always find myself wanting him to be more funny or more entertaining (as is the case with his answers to my questions: proving he's no trained monkey, his replies are direct and thoughtful). I feel like I should love this guy — he's got a great shtick, I dig his whole gender-bending thing — but somehow his acts just don't connect with me. But what I do love about this film is how it gets behind the scenes and shows Izzard fine-tuning his act during a series of warm-up gigs.

I know there are many people — as you'll see going ga-ga in this film — who consider Izzard the greatest comic of our time. So, it is for them that I post the following Q & A with Believe director Sarah Townshend and Mr. Izzard himself. Who knew he was a World War II doc fan?  

Doc Soup: Please tell me a little about how your relationship with Eddie evolved from the beginning.

Sarah Townshend: I met Eddie [about 20 years ago] when I was running a theatre at the Edinburgh Festival and he was looking to perform there. I was immediately engaged by his quirky sense of humour, which then turned into a lasting friendship. Over the years we developed a mutual understanding of each other and each other's work, which I think shows in Believe. I felt there was a side to Eddie that people would not see unless it was told in a forum such as this. The side of him which is hard working, resilient, and which never slows down. It is the side which isn't often shown and which I think many people will relate to.

Read more of the interviews after the jump...

Viewer reactions to The Suicide Tourist, with so many sharing their own stories...

Two men on a remarkable journey high in the Himalayas investigate threats to global water and food supply. Seventy-five percent of the world's fresh water is stored in glaciers, but scientists predict climate change will cause some of the world's largest glaciers to completely melt by 2030. What effect will this have on our daily lives, especially our water and food supply? With global warming falling low on a national list of American concerns, it's time to take a deeper look at what could be a global calamity in the making. In a special one-hour NOW on PBS, David Brancaccio and environmentalist Conrad Anker -- one of the world's leading high altitude climbers -- adventure to the Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayan Mountains, the source of the Ganges River, to witness the great melt and its dire consequences first-hand. The two also visit Montana's Glacier National Park to see the striking effects of global warming closer to home and learn how melting glaciers across the world can have a direct impact on food prices in the U.S. Along the way, Brancaccio and Anker talk to both scientists and swamis, bathe in the River Ganges, view a water shortage calamity in India, and see with their own eyes and cameras the tangible costs of climate change. "We can't take climate change and put it on the back burner," warns Anker. "If we don't address climate change, we won't be around as humans."

(Photo by Robin Holland)

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers talked with New York University president John Sexton for a wide-ranging conversation about religion, the role of higher education in a globalizing world, and the troubling disintegration of civil discourse in today's society.

Sexton suggested that America increasingly exhibits what he calls an "allergy to thought" and that universities are the key to restoring nuance to public discourse:

"This is a pattern that I see: an allergy to thought, to complexity [and] nuance - a kind of collapse into an intellectual relativism where opinions become fact... It's a dangerous thing... I think there's a growing hostility to knowledge in this country... Our national progress is being retarded because we have fallen into this discourse by slogan. We have fallen into this relativism where it's a conversation to stop and say, "Well, that's your opinion. [This is] my opinion...' Go back to the Athenian idea of political speech - it was a search for good answers. We're so far from that today that it's almost ludicrous for me to bring that up, but I want to remind us... We don't listen well as a society. When we listen, we listen in feedback loops to people who are likely to say what it is we think is right... We're in the process, it seems to me, because of this allergy to complexity and nuance, of devaluing the importance of education... I think universities are the last, best hope for pushing back against this because what we do is complexity and nuance."

Some critics contend that many of today's universities refuse to foster a truly vigorous exchange of ideas. Arguing in the WALL STREET JOURNAL that recent high-profile incidents at Yale, Harvard and Duke demonstrate universities' lack of commitment to open dialogue, columnist Peter Berkowitz wrote:

"Professors have a professional interest in - indeed a professional duty to uphold - liberty of thought and discussion. But in recent years, precisely where they should be most engaged and outspoken they have been apathetic and inarticulate... The aim of liberal education is not to guard [students'] sensitivities but to teach them to listen to diverse opinions and fortify them to respond with better arguments to those with whom they disagree... As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven't had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America's professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors' loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?"

What do you think?

Does American society suffer from "an allergy to thought?" Why or why not?

Do you believe that America's universities encourage open and nuanced debate on the issues of our time? Explain.

Are there other institutions you see "pushing back" against sloganeering in favor of honest and intelligent dialogue?

New development: A second officer has been charged in the Danziger Bridge cover-up...

Bill Moyers concluded the JOURNAL this week by mentioning his favorite poem, "Yes To Blue" by Jim Haba long-time director of the Dodge Poetry Festival. It's reproduced below:

"Yes to blue after trying
to separate green from yellow
and hoping that everything
will get simpler each time
you bring an idea closer
to the light which is always
changing always being
born
day after day
year after year
again and again
now"

Explore more poetry from the Moyers Digital Archives.

Please share your favorite poem in the space below.

Living in these United States, there comes a point at which you throw your hands up in exasperation and despair and ask a fundamental question or two: how much excess profit does corporate America really need? How much bigger do executive salaries and bonuses have to be, how many houses or jets or artworks can be crammed into a life?

After all, as billionaire movie director Steven Spielberg is reported to have said, when all is said and done, "How much better can lunch get?"

But since greed is not self-governing, hardly anyone raking in the dough ever stops to say, "That's it. Enough's enough! How do we prevent it from sweeping up everything in its path, including us?"

Look at the health care industry saying to hell with consumers and then hiking premiums - by as much as 39% in the case of Anthem Blue Cross in California. According to congressional investigators, over a two-year period Anthem's parent company WellPoint spent more than $27 million dollars for executive retreats at luxury resorts. And in 2008, WellPoint paid 39 of its executives more than a million dollars each. Profit before patients.

View -- it reveals why Pakistan's public schools are a ticking time bomb. The secretary of state referenced it in her Congressional testimony last week.

After watching last night's exciting win for Kathryn Bigelow and realizing that today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, I found myself wondering who had been the first woman director to win Best Documentary? And for that matter, how many documentaries directed by women have won Oscars in the history of the Academy Awards?

A little googling informed me that this is not exactly easy information to come by. The first time documentaries were acknowledged at the Academy Awards was in 1942 — and it was actually a tie between four films (!) — all about war and all directed by men (including one entitled Prelude to War by Frank Capra). I kept clicking. I thought I hit pay dirt with 1945's winner, The True Glory, a British film directed by Carol Reed (the English Leni Riefenstahl, perhaps?), but was reminded in the next graph that Carol used to be a popular name for boys when "she" was referred to as "Sir Carol Reed."

After trolling through two decades of mostly war and travel docs in Wikipedia, I finally found the first documentary directed by a woman to win best feature. It's a biopic entitled Helen Keller in Her Story (also known as The Unconquered), and it won in 1955. The director-writer-composer-producer Nancy Hamilton is described in imdb.com as "one of the true triple-threat pioneer film-women of the time." The film also gets a 9.3 out of 10 rating.

Find out about more winning women after the jump.

Independent journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the world of documentaries in his column, Doc Soup. You can also follow Tom on Twitter @DocSoupMan.

Hollywood's biggest night was not, sadly, documentary film's finest hour. The 2010 Oscar ceremony will be most remembered for how The Hurt Locker trumped Avatar, and how Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director award. But, for documentary fans, it may be remembered for a couple of missed opportunities.

Things certainly didn't start well for me, as my cable provider, Cablevision, is at war with ABC. This battle blocked the telecast for the first 15 minutes — we were tuned in just as the first award was being presented. That was a stark reminder that this show is, of course, all about money. But once the awards started rolling, I was pleased to see that I had correctly predicted the doc winners — Music by Prudence in the Short category, and The Cove in the Feature category.

Read more after the jump.

Colgan Air's reaction to our recent investigation into regional airlines - and see what others in the industry say.