Episodes
Thursday Aug 30, 2012
Smoke Signals
Thursday Aug 30, 2012
Thursday Aug 30, 2012
Wednesday Aug 29, 2012
Ascent of the A-Word
Wednesday Aug 29, 2012
Wednesday Aug 29, 2012
People are often shocked by profanity, but after all, that’s the point. Profanity is a kind of social punctuation that we use when we need to shock, or describe in ways that other words just may not suffice. Perhaps few profanities today are as common or more attuned to our celebrity culture than the A-Word. A word that linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, in his new work Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years
, ties to the sense of entitlement that permeates so much of our culture.
My conversation with Geoffrey Nunberg:
Friday Aug 17, 2012
Privacy
Friday Aug 17, 2012
Friday Aug 17, 2012
I’ve often quoted the former head of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNeally who once said, almost a decade ago that, “there is no privacy, get over it.” And that was before Facebook, apps, Foursquare, location based retail, etc. To a large extent this raises the issue of a generational divide regarding our attitudes about privacy. But what we don’t often think about is whether or not our attitudes about privacy are shaped by culture, economics and class. Harper's contribing editor Garret Keizer offers an interesting new anaylsis in his new book Privacy. My conversation with Garret Keizer:
Tuesday Aug 07, 2012
Marilyn
Tuesday Aug 07, 2012
Tuesday Aug 07, 2012
50 years ago this week, the world awoke to the death of Marilyn Monroe. At her death she was already one of the most well known Americans of the twentieth century. In death she would become even more famous. Steeped in mythology and contradiction, she would become a symbol of her times; the lens of her own dysfunction giving her a unique ken on post-war America. Now historian Lois Banner, in her new biography Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, that Maureen Dowd talked about this past Sunday, gives us a deep and complicated woman, whose life would reflect many aspect of our society back upon us. My conversation with Lois Banner:
Monday Aug 06, 2012
Who Gets What When Tragedy Strikes
Monday Aug 06, 2012
Monday Aug 06, 2012
When disaster strikes and loss happens, both human loss and economic loss, people look to be both assured first and then compensated. The assurance is often the job of government, of social institutions and of friends, neighbors and family. When people look to be compensated for a disaster, the process is often a lot more complicated. Who pays, what’s the loss worth and and how emotion enters into the economic algorithm are all relevant issues. Few understand this equation better than Kenneth Feinberg. Feinberg ran the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, was the “Pay Czar,” for the TARP bailout and was in charge of disbursing all claims in the BP oil spill. He talks about all of this in his book Who Gets What: Fair Compensation after Tragedy and Financial Upheaval My conversation with Ken Feinberg:
Thursday Aug 02, 2012
KP2
Thursday Aug 02, 2012
Thursday Aug 02, 2012
Tuesday Jul 31, 2012
Teach Your Children Well
Tuesday Jul 31, 2012
Tuesday Jul 31, 2012
The story goes that Marissa Mayer, the newly minted CEO of Yahoo, and a former VP at Google, once declined an otherwise brilliant job applicant at Google because they had once gotten a C in a math class. Clearly in today's competitive world, academic success matters. The bar must be set high for academic success. But it must be set just as high for creativity, innovation and collaboration. But what about the kids that are not cut out to be the renaissance children of the next generation? What about those kids, even those from privilege, whose interests lie elsewhere? Whose job is it to see to it that they too are educated well and steered toward important places in our society? Dr. Madeline Levine, a Bay Area clinician and the best selling author of The Price of Privilege, looks at these issues anew in her new work Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. My conversation with Madeline Levine: