Episodes
Monday Jul 30, 2012
The Sandcastle Girls
Monday Jul 30, 2012
Monday Jul 30, 2012
Over the course of his career, bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. An isolated Vermont farmhouse, the Roaring Twenties on Long Island, and the last six months of World War Two in Poland and Germany just a few. Now, In his fifteenth book, The Sandcastle Girls, he brings us on a very different and personal journey. A sweeping historical love story steeped in the author's Armenian heritage.
My conversation with Chris Bohjalian:
Sunday Jul 29, 2012
The Intention Economy
Sunday Jul 29, 2012
Sunday Jul 29, 2012
Our relationship to the things we buy and the companies we buy from, is constantly changing. David "Doc" Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, argues that to date, it’s been a kind of master/slave relationship. Think of the rhetoric. Merchants "capture" customers, they want "to own" customers, they want to gather data on customer, have cookies follow them around. All so as to ostensible make our experience better. But is it? From the perspective of the seller, John Wanamaker used to say that he knew that half of his advertising expenditures worked, he just didn't know which half. Given the internet and the free flow of information, shouldn't the experience be more empowering for the consumer and less so for the seller? Yet it’s evolved in a way that is just the opposite. Doc Searls wants to change that, as he explains in his new work The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. My conversation with Doc Searls:
Saturday Jul 28, 2012
True Believers
Saturday Jul 28, 2012
Saturday Jul 28, 2012
It’s hard to believe sometimes that forty-plus years after “the sixties,” after Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, and sex drugs and rock and roll, we are still litigating the issues raised in that period. Clearly it is one of the seminal inflection points in American history. Buy why? What really happened; what really changed in that period, that tilted the earth's axis? There’s an old saying that says "if you remember the sixties, you weren't really there." Maybe that's why we still haven't figured it out. Long time journalist and novelist Kurt Andersen takes his shot, as he uses it as the backdrop for his new novel True Believers. My conversation with Kurt Andersen:
Thursday Jul 26, 2012
Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?
Thursday Jul 26, 2012
Thursday Jul 26, 2012
To paraphrase a marketing expression, science, it not just for nerds anymore. If we want to fully understand the human condition, including our sexuality, our relationships and our desires, we need to understand science. Every month in Scientific America and Slate, Jesse Bering brings these issues to the forefront of consciousnes. Now he takes us on a kind of grand tour evolutionary biology in his book Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human. My conversation with Jesse Bering:
Monday Jul 23, 2012
Barack Obama: The Story
Monday Jul 23, 2012
Monday Jul 23, 2012
George Bernard Shaw once observed “that life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." For many people that is undoubtedly true. Bill Clinton might be the penultimate example of that. But for Barack Obama, it has always been about both. About understanding the world that created him, and then using that raw material to reassemble the pieces, to create himself anew. This journey is at the core of David Maraniss's sweeping historical biography, Barack Obama: The Story. My conversation with David Maraniss:
Wednesday Jul 18, 2012
Death by a thousand puffs
Wednesday Jul 18, 2012
Wednesday Jul 18, 2012
We all know cigarettes are bad for us. We know they are the only legal product that, if used as directed, will kill us. What we don't know is the degree to which tobacco companies manipulate their product. The way they add hundreds of harmful chemicals and compounds, of which we are mostly unaware, and which make them the world's largest cause of death.
Given these facts, shouldn't they be outlawed? Not banned, but outlawed!
Stanford Professor Robert Proctor thinks so and he make a powerful case in the 700+ pages of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
My conversation with Robert Proctor:
Monday Jul 16, 2012
The Locavore Myth?
Monday Jul 16, 2012
Monday Jul 16, 2012
Wednesday Jul 11, 2012
Twilight of the Elites
Wednesday Jul 11, 2012
Wednesday Jul 11, 2012
It has not been a good decade. Since the dawn of the 21st century, almost all of our ideas of community, culture, even our notions of what constitutes a country; not to mention how we communicate, do business, read, think and see are being transformed and are cascading in upon us.
Since the turn of the century we've experienced Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, the housing bubble, bank collapses, the implosion of traditional media and Wall Street, the foibles of baseball and the Catholic Church, the collapse of the auto industry and the impotence of Washington. Now Chris Hayes, of The Nation and MSNBC, connects the dots among these seemingly disparate events and finds some very common threads. He lays our the arguments in his book Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy.
My conversation with Christopher Hayes:
Monday Jul 09, 2012
The war within the war for Afghanistan
Monday Jul 09, 2012
Monday Jul 09, 2012
Monday Jul 02, 2012
EXIT
Monday Jul 02, 2012
Monday Jul 02, 2012
My conversation with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot: