Episodes
Tuesday Aug 24, 2021
America Is No Longer A Serious Nation: My conversation with Tom Nichols:
Tuesday Aug 24, 2021
Tuesday Aug 24, 2021
Friday Aug 20, 2021
Roger Bennett Teaches Us About Soccer AND About America
Friday Aug 20, 2021
Friday Aug 20, 2021
Sunday Aug 15, 2021
The Second American Revolution - Will it Ever Be Won?
Sunday Aug 15, 2021
Sunday Aug 15, 2021
My guests on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, David and Margaret Talbot, label that war the Second American Revolution. The issues revolved around armed conflict abroad (Vietnam), civil rights, feminism, gay rights, Native American rights, workers rights, and the role of celebrities in the political process.
One of the Talbots’ conclusions is that the past is not just prologue — It’s not even the past.
They argue — in this conversation and in their new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams — that the ’60s were a time when every cultural and political progressive action was met with an equal reaction. A time when the FBI engaged in the kind of widespread, invasive surveillance that makes even today’s Pegasus project seem like child’s play.
The Talbots remind us that charismatic leadership, not just grassroots efforts, catalyzed the political and social activism of the ’60s. Leaders had to put their bodies on the line in the streets, not on social media.
Discussing how these efforts morphed from the optimism of the early ’60s to the weary cynicism of today, the Talbots draw a sobering lesson in By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution.
Thursday Aug 05, 2021
The Ultimate Corporate Delusion: The Story of WeWork
Thursday Aug 05, 2021
Thursday Aug 05, 2021
And yet this is the story of Adam Neumann and WeWork. But it’s also a story of Silicon Valley, of Wall Street, of international investors, of obsessions with millennials, of portfolio theory taken too far, and it all comes together to create the perfect corporate storm.
While there are some bad and greedy actors in this story, I would argue it's one with no heroes, and no real villains….because it exists, like many of our greatest corporate dramas, inside the protective bubble of a unique moment in place and time. -
Telling this story, as more than just the story of Adam Neumann and a failed business model, but telling it in the context of all of the aforementioned moving parts, is WSJ reporter Maureen Farrell in The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion.
Sunday Aug 01, 2021
Trump's Final Days: My conversation with Carol Leonnig
Sunday Aug 01, 2021
Sunday Aug 01, 2021
But today the world is speeded up. Today, especially in the wake of Trump, we need the facts much sooner. We need to learn not just how to escape the mistakes of history but to escape their repetition and to learn quickly from the actions of recent times.
Pulitzer prize winning Washington Post reporters Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig have become the modern masters of this genre. With their first book A Very Stable Genius, early in the Trump presidency, they telegraphed what was ahead. No one that read their book could have been surprised at what happened next.
And now with their latest, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year they have given us a narrative history of the troubled final days of the Trump presidency, and maybe the final days of democracy as we've come to know it.
My conversation with Carol Leonnig: