Episodes
Saturday Jun 29, 2013
The environment...now!
Saturday Jun 29, 2013
Saturday Jun 29, 2013
Friday Jun 28, 2013
Paris
Friday Jun 28, 2013
Friday Jun 28, 2013
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
The patients point of view
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
What Doctors Feel
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Mexico and the United States, and the Road Ahead
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Thursday Jun 27, 2013
Wednesday Jun 26, 2013
I Spy
Wednesday Jun 26, 2013
Wednesday Jun 26, 2013
Wednesday Jun 26, 2013
Wednesday Jun 26, 2013
Monday Jun 24, 2013
Tower of Basel
Monday Jun 24, 2013
Monday Jun 24, 2013
Sunday Jun 23, 2013
DSM 5 - The Book of Woe
Sunday Jun 23, 2013
Sunday Jun 23, 2013
Sunday Jun 23, 2013
History is the Third Parent
Sunday Jun 23, 2013
Sunday Jun 23, 2013
Thursday Jun 20, 2013
The power of family
Thursday Jun 20, 2013
Thursday Jun 20, 2013
Wednesday Jun 19, 2013
Alysia Abbott's memoir of her father
Wednesday Jun 19, 2013
Wednesday Jun 19, 2013
Tuesday Jun 18, 2013
The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies
Tuesday Jun 18, 2013
Tuesday Jun 18, 2013
Few people understand president Obama better than Jonathan Alter. He has covered Obama since his days in Chicago. He wrote an early Newsweek cover story that help bring Obama to national prominence and has been one of the preeminent chroniclers of Obama's campaigns and more importantly, it’s connection to the Obama Presidency.
Over the years there have been several books central to changing our view of politics. Theodore White’s, Making of the President, F. Clifton White’s Suite 3505, Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968, and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the 1972 campaign. Now Jonathan Alter, award winning reporter, columnist, former senior for Newsweek, adds his new book The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies
to that list.
My conversation with Jonathan Alter:
Friday Jun 14, 2013
An Inner History of the New America
Friday Jun 14, 2013
Friday Jun 14, 2013
Earlier in the week I spoke with British MP, Jesse Norman about Edmund Burke and the old idea of Conservatism as a way to address social order and care for the needs of generations past and future. After reading George Packer's new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, it makes you think that perhaps we need some of that institutional conservatism today.
Packer deconstructs the past thirty years of "progress" in America and in so doing brilliantly gives narrative drive to the changes in almost every aspect of American life. You come a way with the realization that we are no longer held together by trusted institutions, but by individual brands, all competing in the marketplace. The questions is, is this any way to run a Democracy?
My conversation with George Packer:
Thursday Jun 13, 2013
Farm to Health
Thursday Jun 13, 2013
Thursday Jun 13, 2013
We see demographic statistics that in the next 20 years more than 65% of the world will live in cities. We seem to be moving further and further from the land. In spite of it’s current romanticism, the number of family farms continues to shrink, at the same time that science and technology promises that we may soon be able to create food from 3D printers. While urban Farmers Markets grow, as perhaps the last vestige of our evolutionary roots to the land, one wonders how this shift will really impact us?Can we move so far away from our biological heritage, and still be truly healthy? Daphne Miller, MD is a family physician,and Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and she looks at all of this in Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing. My conversation with Daphne Miller:
Wednesday Jun 12, 2013
The First Conservative
Wednesday Jun 12, 2013
Wednesday Jun 12, 2013
Tuesday Jun 11, 2013
Mexico's Descent into Darkness
Tuesday Jun 11, 2013
Tuesday Jun 11, 2013
As is the case with most of our political debates in this country, we never seem to understand context. As immigration reform is once again front and center, the debate about immigration, particularly from Mexico, should be about more than just numbers and citizenship. We are in fact dealing with a nation going through transition. And while it has been widely reported that Mexico is changing, that it is sprouting greater economic prosperity, greater democracy and less violence, it’s blood soaked tide is still very powerful and still pulls many into to it’s wake One of those has Alfredo Corchado. Carchado is the Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, and his new book is Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness. My conversation with Alfredo Cochado:
Monday Jun 10, 2013
Why is Thinking Clearly so difficult?
Monday Jun 10, 2013
Monday Jun 10, 2013
TS Eliot wrote, in 1934, “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might well have written those words yesterday. Certainly we’ve never had more knowledge, more information and seemingly less wisdom than we do today. What is the connection? How is it, that the more we know, the less we seem to understand and the less we seem to able to clearly and logically process it? The answer it seems is part evolution, part science and part human behavior. It’s part of what Rolf Dobelli examines in his bestselling book.The Art of Thinking Clearly. My conversation with Rolf Dobelli:
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
The Education of Samantha Power
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Samantha Power is brilliant and President Obama’s pick to be the newest member of his cabinet and our new United Nations Ambassador. Her views have often been controversial, but always with a deep moral grounding.
Part of this comes from her study of and admiration for the late UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. de Mello was killed in Iraq in 2003, engaged in the ongoing struggle to balance morality with the practical nature of diplomacy.
Back in 2008, upon the publication of her book on de Mello, Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World,
I spoke with Samantha Power. Listening to that conversation today, we get some very real insights
into the education of Samantha Power.
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Back to the Future
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Imagine the world of today's high technology, but instead of sleek Apple like design, it is all powered by steam, driven by gears and could actually be taken apart and fixed. That’s the world of Steampunk. Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel and sees both the appreciation of and cultural irony in Steampunk. He writes about it inVintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology. My conversation with Brian David Johnson
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Big, Hot, Cheap and Right
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Thursday Jun 06, 2013
Throughout the history of America, and its federalist system, different states have personified, both politically and economically, the ethos of a particular era.
New York would came to represent the economic boom of the 20’s and Chicago with its big shoulders, the apotheosis of industrialization. California would represent post war America and the dreams of the golden land with its promise of freedom and education. Today many would argue that Silicon Valley represents the future. But my guest Erica Grieder thinks we need to look toward the Lone Star State.
That a place many of us instinctively turn away from, may be closer than we think to representing the future of America. It's a place that Erica Grieder says is
Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas.
My conversation with Erica Grieder:
Wednesday Jun 05, 2013
The Autistic Brain
Wednesday Jun 05, 2013
Wednesday Jun 05, 2013
We are creatures of exploration. Today with so much information available to us, and travel so easy, we might be like Alexander the Great with no more places left to conquer. But perhaps the one great mystery, the one great area still left for exploration, is the workings of the human mind. We see it day in and day out with how kids learn, how we process information and how all of our styles of learning are so different. Temple Grandin has been an explorer extraordinaire on this journey. In her previous works, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation, she gave us great insight into the human side and scale of autism. Now in her new book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, she literally takes us inside the brain, to give all of us an affirmative understating of autism itself. My conversation with Temple Grandin:
Monday Jun 03, 2013
Is Mass Extinction Possible?
Monday Jun 03, 2013
Monday Jun 03, 2013
When we think about the future, and the vast array of dangers that we face as a society and a species, how big do we think? Is our future measured in days, weeks, hours or perhaps millennia? For Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen stand-in in Annie Hall, the future was far, far away as the young man worried about the “universe expanding” while sitting in Brooklyn. The fact is that Alvy was thinking in species time, and history tells us that species do go extinct; that our day will come to an end and that maybe it is something we should be thinking about. Science writer and blogger Annalee Newitz, has certainly been thinking about it, and she lays it out in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. My conversation with Annalee Newitz:
Sunday Jun 02, 2013
Bad Boy
Sunday Jun 02, 2013
Sunday Jun 02, 2013
Friday May 31, 2013
"Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold."
Friday May 31, 2013
Friday May 31, 2013
The New York Times in their obituary called him a "Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." Andrew Greeley was all of these. “A Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism.”
He was a true maverick who was willing take on all sides in any debate. He was not a fan of what the institutional Catholic Church had become, but was just as harsh on what he saw as "secular intellectuals."
I had the chance to speak with him, just once, back in 1999 on the publication of the second volume of his memoirs Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest. So much of what he said thirteen years ago still has relevance, and yet he was so wrong about the pace of progress in the Vatican, and in Latin America.
Here is that conversation.