Episodes
Thursday Sep 29, 2011
This is real infrastructure improvement
Thursday Sep 29, 2011
Thursday Sep 29, 2011
Joan Didion once referred to the freeways as the only secular communion that what we have. Certainly the freeway, more specifically our Interstate Highway System, is the concrete fabric that may be the only thing holding our nation together. But how did this system, the largest public works project in history, ever get done? Certainly, it could never be accomplished today! Today, when we pay lip service to improving our infrastructure, and then doing nothing about, its a particularly good time to go back and look at the creation of that Interstate Highway System and the vision and courage it took to get it done. Journalist and author Earl Swift explains it all in The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. My conversation with Earl Swift:
Tuesday Sep 27, 2011
The 9/11 Oral History Project
Tuesday Sep 27, 2011
Tuesday Sep 27, 2011
A couple of weeks ago we marked the events of 9/11/01. But what were we really marking? What did we celebrate? More than the physical landscape of Ground Zero and the 2755 who perished, it’s important that we also remember those that gave the last full measure of their devotion in the efforts to rescue those inside the building. The first responders and those engaged in the clean up, often mark 9/11 not as an ending, but as the beginning of the physical and emotional problems that scar them to this day. But what about their story? Their names are not etched in the granite of Ground Zero, but Dr. Benjamin Luft did find a way for their stories to be equally enduring. He created the 9/11 Oral History Project. It's part of his book We're Not Leaving: 9/11 Responders Tell Their Stories of Courage, Sacrifice, and Renewal. My conversation with Dr. Benjamin Luft:
Monday Sep 26, 2011
Take the Lead
Monday Sep 26, 2011
Monday Sep 26, 2011
It used to be that the military style of leadership, top down command and control, was how the world operated. Today, in the military as well as business and life, leadership is about how we connect with each other. How we inspire others, how we collaborate effectively, how we incorporate the new values of our time into entrepreneurship and leadership. Few understand these principles better than Betsy Meyers. She has been Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Director of the Office of Women's Business Ownership at the US Small Business Administration. She served as a COO and senior adviser to Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign and was a senior official in the Clinton Administration. She distills her wisdom in her new book Take the Lead: Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You. My conversation with Betsy Myers:
Friday Sep 23, 2011
My conversation with Wendy Wasserstein from June 2001
Friday Sep 23, 2011
Friday Sep 23, 2011
My conversation from June 2001, with Wendy Wasserstein on the publication of her book Shiksa Goddess: (Or, How I Spent My Forties) Essays
Friday Sep 23, 2011
Wendy and the Lost Boys
Friday Sep 23, 2011
Friday Sep 23, 2011
Many novelists and playwrights are simply keen observes of the world around them. They watch, they feel, they think and they create and aggregate wonderful stories. But for some, (think Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Tom Wolf,) they themselves embody their work and their time. There is a kind of almost impenetrable membrane between them and the stories and characters they create. Wendy Wasserstein, author of such plays as The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig, was such a writer. She was a true baby boomer, who captured the essence of the post feminist angst of the 80's and gave voice to so many woman who felt as if she knew them personally. Her death at the age of 55, shorted circuited a truly creative life. Journalist and former WSJ film critic Julie Salamon captures all of Wasserstein in Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein My conversation with Julie Salamon: My conversation from June 2001, with Wendy Wasserstein on the publication of her book Shiksa Goddess: (Or, How I Spent My Forties) Essays
Wednesday Sep 21, 2011
The interrogator who understood al Qaeda
Wednesday Sep 21, 2011
Wednesday Sep 21, 2011
Tuesday Sep 20, 2011
The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda
Tuesday Sep 20, 2011
Tuesday Sep 20, 2011
Monday Sep 19, 2011
What can we learn from The New Deal
Monday Sep 19, 2011
Monday Sep 19, 2011
We study history not only to tell us what we should do, but also what we should avoid. For it is the task of succeeding generation to escape history, to escape its repetition, that is to avoid the mistakes of other times. The problem is that too often the history we study and try and learn from is seeped in mythology and falsehood. Today as we continue to face the most severe and complex financial crises since the Great Depression, we look back at Roosevelt's New Deal for guidance and answers. The problem is, often the rehorthic and reality of that time are at odds. That's why Pulitzer Prize winner and LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik's new book The New Deal: A Modern History is so important. He gives us not the FDR iconography and myth, but the flesh and blood story of human beings doing their best, often by trial and error, to right the nation at one of its great historical inflection points. My conversation with Michael Hiltzig:
Thursday Sep 15, 2011
Intelligence run amuck
Thursday Sep 15, 2011
Thursday Sep 15, 2011
After 9/11 we thought we did everything to protect ourselves from another terrorist attack. In fact, we may have done too much. We created multiple security programs, hired hundreds of thousand of people, all with top secret clearances and in so doing, may have created an intelligence bureaucracy, the size, scope and duplication of which has put us at even greater risk. So argues Washington Post journalist William Arkin who, along with multi Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Dana Priest, examines all of this in their new book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. My conversation with William Arkin:
Wednesday Sep 14, 2011
The cult of Scientology
Wednesday Sep 14, 2011
Wednesday Sep 14, 2011
Tuesday Sep 13, 2011
9/11, The Oil Kings and the Balance of Power in the Middle East
Tuesday Sep 13, 2011
Tuesday Sep 13, 2011
The events we marked on 9/11 were not isolated. They have their roots deep in the history of American foreign policy. At the heart of that policy lies our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the economic crises we faced as a result in the 1970's, our support of the Shah and decisions made by Presidents' Nixon, Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. To better understand this lineage, we need to look closely at the history altering chain of events that saw its apogee on 9/11 and from which we've unfortunately learned very little. Andrew Scott Cooper lays it all out for us in his new work The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East. My conversation with Andrew Scott Copper:
Monday Sep 12, 2011
Cleopatra
Monday Sep 12, 2011
Monday Sep 12, 2011
In her time she was the most powerful woman in the Western World. She was not afraid to use her feminine powers in ways that today, would be considered politically incorrect. She was highly educated and sophisticated, the richest woman of her time and her story wold be the subject of propaganda and revisionism. She was Cleopatra and although her story takes place over two thousand years ago, many of her life themes are as contemporary as today’s headlines. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff's best selling biography Cleopatra: A Life captures it all as if she were there. My conversation with Stacy Schiff:
Friday Sep 09, 2011
Autism Speaks
Friday Sep 09, 2011
Friday Sep 09, 2011
The statistics are powerful. Today, one in every 110 children is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes and pediatric AIDS combined. Statistics further suggest that the rate of autism is increasing 10-17 percent annually. Studies suggest boys are more likely than girls to develop autism and receive the diagnosis. Yet we still don't know the cause or causes, but research is making great progress. On the forefront of that research is Dr. Clara Lajonchere, currently serves as VP of Clinical Programs at Autism Speaks. My recent conversation with Dr. Lajonchere:
Wednesday Sep 07, 2011
The First Big Box Store
Wednesday Sep 07, 2011
Wednesday Sep 07, 2011
American have a schizophrenic relationship with retail. On the one hand we want choice. We feel we are entitled to boundless choices and variety. We also want low prices, particularly in these tough economic times. Yet we hold out a soft spot for the little guy, the mom and pop retailer fighting against the big box behemoth. While this may sound like a conflict taken from today's headlines, its roots go back to the l920's, when the Greater Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, A & P, took on the small town grocer. In almost 100 years we have still not reconciled this dichotomy. In fact, the romanticism for those small mom and pops has become even stronger. Marc Levinson takes us through this history in The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. My conversation with Marc Levinson:
Tuesday Sep 06, 2011
The Last Day of the Soviet Union
Tuesday Sep 06, 2011
Tuesday Sep 06, 2011
In their new book about the state of America today, Thom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum talk of the end of the Cold War as perhaps the seminal event that reshaped the America we have today. Suddenly without an enemy, we had to redefine who we were and what we represented as a nation. Yet as important as that event was, we know little about what really went on inside the former Soviet Union that precipitated its breakup, or it’s real impact inside Russia today. Conor O'Clery lived and reported from the former Soviet Union in it's final days, up to and including Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union. My conversation with Conor O'Clery:
Friday Sep 02, 2011
The Boy Who Love BATMAN
Friday Sep 02, 2011
Friday Sep 02, 2011
Suppose you had a youthful passion. Over the years you nurtured that passion, believed in it and even convinced your parents that there might be value in collecting tens of thousands of comic books. Your dad even lets you take over the garage for your comics. At five years old, you fall in love with Batman, and somehow know it might be your future. Over the years you keep that passion as your focus. You become a lawyer as a the only way you know to get into the creative side of show business, and then you parlay that into ownership of the rights to make Batman into a movie. Then, after all of that, you finally get to begin the decade long process to convince someone, in a position of power in Hollywood, to share or even understand your vision for Batman. In the process you create one of the most successful series in the history of movies. And maybe, just maybe, you keep your sanity while it sometimes seems that those around you are loosing theirs. The man who did of this is Michael Uslan. He shares his story in him new memoir The Boy Who Loved Batman. My conversation with Michael Uslan:
Thursday Sep 01, 2011
Understanding Afghanistan and why it matters
Thursday Sep 01, 2011
Thursday Sep 01, 2011
It has been said that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires. Certainly, in modern times, the Soviet Union paid a heavy price for it’s adventurism in Afghanistan. More recently American lives and billions dollars have been shed in the service of what may really be local, provincial political interests, inside that country. Today, ten years after 9/11, what do we really know about this country, its real link to international terror, and its role in the larger regional and geopolitical issues shaping this volatile region? For thirty years few have know this place better than journalist Edward Girardet. Now he has distilled and shared much of that knowledge into his new work Killing the Cranes: A Reporter's Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan.b> My conversation with Edward Girardet:
Wednesday Aug 31, 2011
How well have we really done against Al Qaeda?
Wednesday Aug 31, 2011
Wednesday Aug 31, 2011
Historians have often said that we always fight new wars with lessons learned from the last one. Ten years ago, after the tragic events of 9/11, we were woefully unprepared for the battle against Al Qaeda. An organization that existed not in the physical space of a nation state, that might be dealt with by brute force, but rather as a 21st century decentralized network, that would require new methods and a new geopolitical mindset. This would be a war requiring intelligence, patience, technology and whole new ways of looking at the world. Long before the death of Bin Laden, US efforts had been effectively shrinking and neutralizing Al Qaeda. How we did this has been a little known story that is now told by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker of the New York Times, in their book Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda. My conversation with Eric Schmitt: