Episodes
Friday Sep 28, 2012
How Children Succeed
Friday Sep 28, 2012
Friday Sep 28, 2012
Why is it that poor children seem to do consistently worse academically than middle class kids? On the other hand, why do some wealthy children fail or breakdown while occasionally kids from the mean streets of urban neighborhood, can reach monumental heights of success? Is it just IQ or temperament, or is there something else? Something that has to do with the innate character and perseverance of the child? Paul Tough, who introduced many to the work of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone and who is a contributing editor the NY Times Magazine, has spent a year reporting on what makes kids succeed and fail in school and in life. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, is the result of that effort. My conversation with Paul Tough:
Thursday Sep 27, 2012
Stimulus
Thursday Sep 27, 2012
Thursday Sep 27, 2012
Rahm Emanuel, the current Mayor of Chicago and the President's former Chief Of Staff said, during the height of the economic crisis "that you should never let a serious crisis go to waste." Obama did not. And now Time Magazine senior editor Michael Grunwald shows how the Obama administration heeded that advice.
Grunwald argues that the stimulus, that helped to save the US economy, a stimulus that we’re barely talking about in the context of the current election, was one of the most profound pieces of legislation since the New Deal. It is perhaps the 800 billion pound gorilla that is reshaping America..
My conversation with Michael Grunwald:
Wednesday Sep 26, 2012
The Ethicist
Wednesday Sep 26, 2012
Wednesday Sep 26, 2012
Tuesday Sep 25, 2012
Telegraph Avenue
Tuesday Sep 25, 2012
Tuesday Sep 25, 2012
Set in 2004, in Berkeley, Michael Chabon's new novel, Telegraph Avenue, his first in five years, gives us characters trying to hold back the end of an era; a time when 70's values and ideas are fading into the sunset, and the full onslaught of the 21st Century is coming upon them. My conversation with Michael Chabon:
Thursday Sep 20, 2012
The End of Men
Thursday Sep 20, 2012
Thursday Sep 20, 2012
How did we get here and what does it mean for our future? In a way it’s a perfect storm. The changing nature of work, the move from an industrial to an information based economy, requiring a different set of skills, plus the social revolution of the 60's, the civil rights movement, title IX, and finally the failure, around the world, of patriarchy in all its forms, all played some part.
As a result, have we reached the end of 200,000 years of human history OR is this simply a mid course correction on the road to greater gender equality and the full flourishing of both sexes? Atlantic senior editor
Hanna Rosin brings it all into focus in her bestselling book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women .
My conversation with Hanna Rosin:
Wednesday Sep 19, 2012
The Twilight War
Wednesday Sep 19, 2012
Wednesday Sep 19, 2012
If there is any one problem that has run through the center of American foreign policy over the past 30 years, through five successive administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, it is the poisoned relationship with Iran
As students yelled “death to the Shah” in 1979, it set in motion a chain of events, an anti Americanism, that has become a part to the DNA of the country itself. Trying to understand it, and treat it has been one of the central pillars of our foreign policy. Yet with each successive treatment, the disease always threatens to burst out and become full blown. This is where we are once again, and why we need take a look as new book by the senior historian for the federal government, David Crist.
My conversation with David Crist about The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran:
Tuesday Sep 18, 2012
The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power
Tuesday Sep 18, 2012
Tuesday Sep 18, 2012
Monday Sep 17, 2012
Why Wall Street Always Wins
Monday Sep 17, 2012
Monday Sep 17, 2012
To date there has not been a single prosecution, much less a serious investigation into the events that brought the US economy to its knees. The SEC has not changed the rules, the Senate has repeatedly kowtowed to the big banks and "too big to fail" is still the name of the game.
Are these just random issues, or is Wall Street simply too powerful for any part of the government to take on? Or should it even try? Former White House and Senate staffer, Jeff Connaughton takes a look at all of this in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins.
My conversation with Jeff Connaughton:
Friday Sep 14, 2012
Geeks takeover campaigns
Friday Sep 14, 2012
Friday Sep 14, 2012
Wednesday Sep 12, 2012
What did we know, and when did we know it?
Wednesday Sep 12, 2012
Wednesday Sep 12, 2012
For eleven years U.S. foreign policy and even domestic attitudes about our place in the world, have been shaped by the reaction to the events of 9/11. But that reaction did not take place in a vacuum. In many ways, as we are coming to learn, the Bush administration's reaction was shaped by what they knew, when they knew it and what they did or did not do about it. Further the mistakes made in the eighteen months after 9/11, created a kind of alternative universe in which policy was shaped not by real events, but by a perception of reality, shaped by repeated mistakes. This is the backdrop for prize winning and best selling author Kurt Eichenwald, in his new work 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars. My conversation with Kurt Eichenwald:
Monday Sep 10, 2012
Not Working
Monday Sep 10, 2012
Monday Sep 10, 2012
In the post-depression years, Studs Terkel in his seminal project, "Working," gave us the best picture yet of working men and woman. In so doing he raised popular oral history to an important and respectable level. He gave people a chance to talk and gave all of the country a chance to listen and better understand each other.
Today, it is those who are not working, who are experiencing the real personal pain of economic dislocation, that we must understand in order to better understand each other. DW Gibson, has traveled the country to compile and tell these powerful and unifying stories in his book Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy Rather than the “long tail” of technology pulling us apart, as some claim, perhaps these stories really are the key to bringing us together.
My conversation with DW Gibson:
Friday Sep 07, 2012
Julia
Friday Sep 07, 2012
Friday Sep 07, 2012
Tuesday Sep 04, 2012
Delay, Delay, Delay
Tuesday Sep 04, 2012
Tuesday Sep 04, 2012
Almost every aspect of lives moves at rapid pace. We struggle to keep up. We’re told we have to keep up or get left behind. That to delay, is to procrastinate and that just may be the cardinal sin of the digital age.
But what if delay, be it a few seconds, a few weeks or more, helps us to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes? In life, in business, in the pursuit of happiness, delay may be our friend. Just maybe the procrastinators know something that we don’t. Law and Finance Professor Frank Partnoy explains in Wait: The Art and Science of Delay,
that delaying our responses can transform our experiences for the better.
My conversation with Frank Partnoy.