Talk Cocktail

He Used Journalism as a Way to Understand the World

It always amazing with famous people, particularly those that sit atop the world stage, to find out things, even after decades, that we didn't’ know.  It’s interesting information. But most of all it reshapes how we understand them and the how these new surprises might have shaped the world they touched. 

Such is the case with Winston Churchill and his underreported years as a journalist and war correspondent. This is the world that Simon Read takes us into in Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent.

My conversation with Simon Read: 

A Rare Look at America at its Best

Say the word immigration today, and the political implications are both ugly and controversial.  On the plus side a survey out just this week shows that a significant majority of young people in the US see themselves as citizens of the world, and not just citizens of America.  A full 58% feel that the US is no better than many other countries in the world.  

It is against this backdrop of hope and acceptance, that Susan Eaton (Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best)explores real people doing real work, to fully realize the power of immigration and integration and to make us stronger in what certainly right now seems like our broken places.

My conversation with Susan Eaton:

Teens that Read....Imagine

While I have not seen the movie, I do know from talking to some teens that the new film Pride and Prejudice Zombies has actually inspired kids to ask questions about Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austin.

It's a surprise that in our media saturated culture, at a time when texting seems like long form communications, compared to Instagram, many kids are still interested in reading.

How is this possible? Long time New Yorker staff writer and film critic David Denby went back to High School to find out how students begin to appreciate reading and to see if screen obsessed teens can actually be inculcated in the pleasures of reading. The result is Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives. 

My conversation with David Denby:

Artist, Critic, Beauty and Truth

How many times have you gone to the movies, or to an art exhibit or read a book  and not really felt that you’ve completed the experience until you’ve talked about the movie or show or exhibit with someone else?  Either the person you went with, or somebody who read or saw the same thing.  

This is at once both the most primal of social media and also emphasizes the importance of opinion and criticism.  Both give art context and, through the process of discussion or even argument, the ability to sort out, to understand and process what we saw.

This is and has been the job of critics and criticism in our society.  In this why criticism is like legal thinking.  It marshals and structures ideas, in ways that give art its power and forward thrust.

But in today's society, where everyone can have a platform, where our respect for expertise seems fragile at best, where the long tail of confirmation bias seems to drive everything from our politics, to musical and artistic taste, what role is there for the critic.  This is what NY Times film critic A.O. Scott writes about in Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

My conversation with A.O. Scott:

With every song in our pocket, why do we listen to the same stuff over and over and over again?

This year, in a very tired and traditional way, the Grammy’s focused on the world of Pop music.  But the fact is, no matter how traditional the show, what’s undeniable is that the world of music is nothing like it was twenty years ago. Today, in your pocket is virtually all of the world's music.  The long tail of music has never been longer.  And yet in our music, not unlike our politics, our confirmation bias leads us over and over and over again to that with which we are familiar, which makes us comfortable and safe. Couple this with streaming algorithms that lead us back, over and over, to where we started.

Yet with so much opportunity, with so many options, how do we expand our tastes and our music imagination in ways consistent with all of this new technology?

One way is to start with a new book by long time NY Times jazz and music critic Ben Ratlif, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty.

My conversation with Ben Ratliff:

The New World of Medical Tourism

We are all driving cars with parts made all other the world.  Our phones, our appliances, our banking is either made, touched and/or connected to every part of the world.  Globalization is not going away. In fact, it expanding to now include even our health care.

Where once the rich might engage in medical tourism for cosmetic or exotic procedures, today medical tourism is an international businesses taking place all other the globe.

Like the free flow of money and ideas, the free flow of treatment could soon become the future of health care.  Sasha Issenberg reports from the front lines in  Outpatients: The Astonishing New World of Medical Tourism.

My conversation with Sasha Issenberg: 

The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X

I suppose it's the historian's curse that sometimes the people they are writing about become such icons, that getting to the truth becomes impossible. Certainly two such icons of our time, of the civil right era, are Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

Both have become larger than life characters, whose actions and whose longtime friendship and then estrangement shaped not one, but several areas of our cultural landscape

In their new book Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith attempt to capture the real men behind the myths, as they look deeply into their intense two-year friendship and a bond that altered both lives and affected those of millions of others

My conversation with Randy Roberts:

We had all been warned!

Millions of words have been written about Donald Trump.  But one thing always seem to be certain with Trump.  Unlike the warnings in the security industry, past performance is absolutely an indication for future returns.

So what exactly do those past performances look like.  Long before Campaign 2016 started, Trump telegraphed pretty much everything we are seeing today.  Even 10 years ago my guest, journalist Timothy O’Brien was granted unfettered access to Trump, wrote TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, only to wind up in court.

Timothy L. O'Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg View. He was previously the executive editor of the Huffington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. Prior to that he was the Sunday Business editor and a reporter at the New York Times. 

My conversation with Timothy O'Brien:

Why we always fall for the con

Paper Moon, The Sting, American Hustle, The Grifters, House of Games, The Matchstick Men; just a few of the movies we love about con men and hustlers.  Yet in real life, we don’t love the likes of Bernie Madoff, or Barry Minkow, or Steven Kunes or Charles Ponzi. 

So why the disconnect?  Why do we feel joy in being taken in by movie con men, but not so much by the real thing?  The answer may very well lie in what a con man does and what he or she is.  How they appear and how they try and manipulate us.  Unfortunately the line between con men and salesmen and politicians is fine one.  Maria Konnikova shows us the tricks in The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time.

My conversation with Maria Konnikova: 

The Future We Want

Think about how much the world has changed in just the past 25 years and then think about how little our politics has changed.  Not just that we’re still talking about Clinton and Bush, but that the issues, the ideas and the ways in which they are discussed has not changed.  One does not have to throw out the principles of our Founders to retool the political process.  In fact, it is precisely those tools that should be used to reshape everything about our politics. 

The good news is that this effort is being midwifed by young people with new values, who believe in transparency and honesty as opposed to duplicity.  Who believe in fairness not obfuscation. Who see that the future is not about fixing the old car, but blowing it up and taking Tesla or Uber.  

We are at what some have called the millennial moment. When power shifts from parents to children. When adults brought up in a different era realize they've lost touch with what's going on. 

Clearly, "there's something happening here" and few understand it better than journalists Sarah Leonard (The Nation) and Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin,) author of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century.

My conversation with Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara:

The GOP end game

This year's GOP primary race, perhaps more than others, does not exist in a vacuum. When Barry Goldwater accepted the GOP nomination in the SF Cow Palace in 1964, he spoke of extremism in the defense liberty and eschewed moderation.  Ever since that moment, so called conservatives have been falling all over themselves trying to live up to those words.  Words that had very little to do with the true conservatism of Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott and words that were later called into question by Goldwater himself.

But the attempt to elevate their mythology, as Ted Cruz is trying to do,  particularly in a rapidly evolving world, may be the final nail in the Republican coffin

This is the context of E.J. Dionne’s insightful new book Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond.

My conversation with E.J. Dionne:

Why Congress needs creative destruction

There must be a dozen books out right now talking about the disfunction in our politics.  Every day pundits, commentators and journalists analyze why our political system doesn’t work.

Most all of them don’t see the forest from the trees.  What they miss, and what Harvard Professor and onetime Presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig understands, is that the central institution, at the core of our democracy is broken. 

Not broken in a way that’s easily fixable by a single election or by a new Speaker of the House.  But that the institution itself has been so infected by things like big money, gerrymandering and our modern day methods of campaigning, that just maybe the whole things has to be pulled up by its roots and reimagined and rebuilt.

In fact, that’s why Lawrence Lessig briefly ran for President of the United States and wrote about his ideas in Republic, Lost: Version 2.0

Listen to my conversation for Radio WhoWhatWhy with Professor Lawrence Lessig:

Why the GOP is only a local party now!

This is a political year like few others.  The traditional laws of political gravity have so far, not seemed to apply.  Part of it is due to the collection of candidates, the public mood, and the long simmering divisions within the Republican party.

It’s also a result of the changing demographics of America, congressional gerrymandering and the ways in which the idea that “all politics is local,” helps one party and not the other.

These ideas are at the heart of University of Maryland Professor Thomas Schaller's new book The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House

My conversation with Thomas Schaller:

Caught Between Two Worlds

Two of the most powerful threads in American history are the immigrant experience and America at war and the impact that those wars have had on the nation and it's people

The impact of WWII, the Japanese American experience and the relationship with Japan that evolved out of the ashes of that war, are the penultimate manifestation of that uniquely American story.  

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto has, in her new book Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds captured its true essence.

My conversation with Pamela Rotner Sakamoto: 

The Woman Who Are Transforming the Arab World

Last month Saudi woman cast their votes for the first time in municipal elections in Riyadh.  And while this is an incredibly positive development in the region, it also, by its very nature points out how limited many of these woman are and how the deeply conservative and gender segregated world of the Middle East has changed so little.

When we look around the world at developing nations, we see that where there has been real progress, in Africa, in Latin America and in parts of Asia, women have played a vital, often central role in advocating and bringing about that progress. 

In the Middle East, where that ability has been so limited, we see the consequences on a daily basis. Katherine Zoepf in Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World gives us an inside view of how these woman are doing.

My conversation with Katherine Zoepf: 

What does the GOP do now?

After its loss in the Presidential election of  2012 the Republican Party felt it needed to do its own after action report.  In the end, it was determined that all was basically ok and that the party only needed to broaden its tent and do a little better with Hispanic voters.  Enter Jeb Bush.

How did that work out?  Not so well!   What we are seeing today is a total repudiation of a Republican establishment that for 40 years has held onto many of its voters with cultural, racial and religious issues, while delivering nothing of economic value.  For the GOP, today the chickens have come home to roost and we understand exactly "what’s the matter with Kansas."

Covering all of this and telling the story from those first days after the 2012 election is BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins in his new book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

My conversation with McKay Coppins:

Why Political Marriages Matter

What goes on inside of a marriage is always a mystery. With a political marriage, even more so.    We all know the stories of the neighbors who have the apparently idyllic marriage, that ends in divorce.  Or the couple that battles incessantly, that have been together for 40 years.  These dynamics, and the psychological mechanism behind them are truly a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

However, with political marriages, and with public figures, we get a better glimpse.  After the fact, we often have letters, tapes, diaries and tell-alls that become a part of the public record.  In analyzing them, we learn a lot about how the marriage worked, how it shaped the individuals and in turn how it shaped history.

This is what we learn about LBJ and Lady Bird in Betty Boyd Caroli’s Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President.

My conversation with Betty Boyd Caroli:  

With Each Fill-Up we Support Repression, Tyrants, War and Terrorism -- The Link Between Natural Resources and Violence

How many times have we heard the phrase, “Big Oil,” when sometimes what we really mean is authoritarian oil. There seems to be a direct and long standing historical nexus between those nations that have much in demand natural resources and countries which have corrupt, brutal and inept economies.

Our increasing demand for these resources, including oil and all the new resources needed by high technology, are helping to support tyrants around the world.  Think about just today’s crisis in , ISIS, Syria, Darfur, the Ukraine; many have at their roots in oil and natural resources.

Listen to my conversation, for Radio WhoWhatWhy, with King's College Philosophy Professor and "Clean Trade" advocate, Leif Wenar.

Why Place Matters

We live today in a world of instant communications. Our computers coupled with services like Skype, allow us to travel to anyplace on earth at the speed of light.  We have seen the surface of the Moon and of Mars and have been in meetings with participants all over the world.

So should this tell us that anyplace is everyplace?  That things like geography, place, and indigenous cultures don’t matter in the 21st century?

Eric Weiner, the author of The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley, argues that that it matters a lot.  In fact, more than ever.

After all, why is it that places like Athens, Florence, Virginia & Philadelphia in 1776 and Silicon Valley today have produced some of the crowning achievements of mankind?  Maybe it’s because, as Eric Weiner says, place matters.

My conversation with Eric Weiner: 

The Brave New World of Health - It's not your father's healthcare

There is almost nothing that we do the way we might have done it just ten years ago.  The way we book travel, get a car, find places to stay, take photographs, date, communicate with your friends, or consume the news.  Creative destruction is everywhere.  However a few of the places where such change have been very late to the party, has been with respect to education, government and healthcare.

In the world of healthcare that’s all beginning to change.  The sheer force of science and discovery has pushed the otherwise staid walls of the medical profession to change. 

And like everything other change, it’s no longer one size fits tall.  The new long tail of medicine is about the customization of treatment and along with it, a required need for individual empowerment. Some might call it squeaky wheel medicine, other might just call it the future.   One of those is my guest Dr. David Agus who tells us about these ideas in The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health

My conversation with Dr. David Agus: 

The Art of Memoir

We live in a culture that is about sharing.  First we shared music, then we shared our likes on Facebook, our photos on Instagram, our dating preferences on Tinder and now we share our cars, our houses, essentially our life.

Amidst all of this, has been our ongoing and growing appreciation of memoir and of personal stories.  Where once fiction provided a place to explore our inner lives and our moral and social choices, today memoir fills that void.

One of the people who brought us to this point, is the bestselling author of The Liars' Club, Lit, Cherry and now The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr.

My conversation with Mary Karr:

A spotlight on child abuse at the Horace Mann School

No matter how  many times we hear the stories of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church, it’s hard to grasp that such things could go on, that they could go on for so long and that so many could be involved as both perpetrators and in the cover up. 

Perhaps it's that people didn't want to believe.  Like the story told by a victim in the new movie SPOTLIGHT.  It the story of a mother, who, even after her son tells her of his abuse, still, out of respect, puts out cookies for the priest when he visits.

In business, or in any institution, it's hard to change culture.  As Peter Drucker, has said of business, “culture eats strategy for lunch.”  

What we’ve seen in the Catholic Church is a layering of cultures.  The culture of the perpetrators, and the culture of secrecy of those that covered it up, combined with the broader culture that encouraged a respect for authority. Together they were a toxic combination

They certainly were at the Horace Mann school in New York, back in the 60’s and  70’s.   The story of Horace Mann was revealed by Amos Kamil in a scorching New York times Magazine story in June of 2012.  Now he tell the full measure of that story in Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School.

My conversation with Amos Kamil:

Have we Mainstreamed Islamaphobia?

The world has changed in many ways since 9/11.  One of those clearly has been the way we look upon Muslims, South Asians and Sikhs.  Arguably these attitudes and prejudices and the degree to which they have become embedded in the fabric of our national DNA has had a corrosive effect on all of our relationships with people of color and people that might be different than ourselves.

Today, since Paris and San Bernadino and the heated political rhetoric that has accompanied it, the depth of those divisions seems to be growing to dangerous proportions.

Deepa Iyer has studied this, written about it and works every day to counteract it.  A task made much harder each days since she wrote her book,  We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future.

My conversation with Deepa Iyer:  

Imagine a non religious world? Imagine Peace

Think about the real divisive issues today, both at home and in the wider world.  Radical Islamic faith tearing apart the Middle East. The faith that drives suicide bombers to the far corners of the planet, and at home, divisions about abortion, marriage, and end of life issues.

At a time when the focus both home and abroad should be on the global economy, health, energy, science, hunger, ending territorial disputes and ending regional conflicts, time and again, the conflict turns back to religion.

Islamists, the Religious Right, all seem allied to restrict rather than enhance individual rights.  And we know from history that such efforts always are the foundation of greater conflict and sometimes revolution.

So how has a global society do we balance religious freedom w

ith freedom from religion.  That answer today seems impossible.

All of that bring us back to atheism and why it’s so hard for atheists to get their message heard.

David Silverman, the President of the American Atheists has been at the forefront of the effort to convey that message and he does it once again in his new book Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World.

My conversation with David Silverman:  

Why is the technology to simplify our lives, so complicated?

We’ve been told for years that one of the key goals of technology was to simplify our life.  In fact, for many people the opposite has happened.  The combination of complexity, feature creep, and the ever updating world of new technology has made the complexity of the process sometimes not worth the effort.

Enter David Pogue.  He spent thirteen years  writing about personal technology for the NY Times.  He launched Yahoo Tech. He writes a monthly  column for Scientific America and created the Missing Manual computer book series. He’s won two Emmys, two Webby awards, and a Loeb award for journalism.

But most of all he is the undisputed master of how to harness the best of technology to serve us and not the other way around.  He does it in a way that is both useful and humorous in his new book Pogue's Basics: Essential Tips and Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You) for Simplifying the Technology in Your Life.

My conversation with David Pogue: 

A great many children left behind

There is a school of thought in crisis management that says, if you have a completely intractable problem, sometimes the only solution is to create a larger problem.  In fact, to blow things up to the point where you get to start over. Sometimes that’s a strategy that happens not just by design, but by outcome.

When then Newark Mayor Cory Booker, N.J. Governor Chris Christie and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg put together a plan that they thought would completely reform and transform Newark schools back in 2010, they thought they were doing the right thing.  However what they did was reminiscent of what Ronald Reagan declared as the most terrifying phrases in the English language…”I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

What they did, what they failed at and even what they succeeded at, shows how incredibly hard it is to be transformative in public education.  This is the story told by Dale Russakoff in The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

My conversation with Dale Russakoff:  

What did he know that his sons did not?

When Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about Roosevelt's first class temperament, he never explained why that was important.

It didn’t explain how, for a future President presiding over victory in two wars in just one term, without braggadocio, might matter,

or respecting those with disabilities and allowing it to become a civil rights issues mattered, or how respecting manners in the conduct of both public and private affairs might shape the destiny of a great nation.  

Yet it is precisely that temperament, that George Herbert Walker Bush brought to the Presidency.  Imagine any of today’s candidates exercising similar temperament, or restraint or manners.  It would be a little like looking for the cool of Sinatra or Jesse Owens, in today’s  music or sports celebrities.

All of this just might be an amusing dinner table conversation about days and behaviors gone by, if Jon Meacham, in his new biography show us so profoundly how these qualities matter in the conduct and outcome of public and international diplomacy Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.

My conversation with Jon Meacham: 

Sinatra at 100

To say that music and pop stars today are transitory is an understatement.  Very few performers today are building careers for the ages, as did entertainers like Frank Sinatra.  Now on the 100th anniversary of Sinatra's birth we’re joined by poet David Lehman for a look at Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World.

My conversation with David Lehman:

How's Your Faith?

In these highly polarized times, we all hear the admonition, especially around holidays and family get-togethers, to make sure you never discuss politics or religion.  

So what is it about both of these subjects that are so personal, so internal so potentially inflammatory that we’re admonished not to discuss them?

Long time NBC journalist and former host of Meet The Press, David Gregory has, for years, been immersed in both of these arenas.  Lately he has put discussion of politics on the side burner to talk about religion, and more specifically the journey he has taken in going deeper into his own faith.

He’s shares that journey in his new book How's Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey

My conversation with David Gregory:

Out of Africa

Even long before the current extreme stratification of America, we heard about two Americas.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Harrington and than John Edwards all talked about two nations living side by side.  One of relative middle class ease on the cutting edge of technology and education and another mired in poverty, resistant to or fearing change.

Today, the same can said about Africa. For in spite of much popular imaginary parts of Africa are at the cutting edge of technology and economic development. 

The rise of the African consumer economy is one of the biggest, and most under-covered, stories. In fact, 

by 2020, seven of the world’s top 10 fastest growing economies will be in sub-Saharan Africa.

The continent already has more mobile subscribers than the US or the EU. Alex Perry has covered Africa for years for TIME and NEWSWEEK.  Now he gives us The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free.

My conversation with Alex Perry:

Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice

We have seen that in almost any area of public endeavor, changing the status quo is almost impossible. The combination of entrenched special interests, coupled with the basic human resistance to change, in an era where change is a constant, creates a level of cognitive dissonance and fear that makes changing public policy almost impossible.

So what do we do when the only alternative to change is catastrophic for our health, for our planet, for our economy and for the peoples of the world?

Such is the case with Climate Change.  While the science may be clear.  The road ahead is anything but. In this we face an unprecedented situation as the world’s leaders gather in Paris this week

That’s why people like Wen Stephenson, (What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice,) are so passionate about the cause and see it not just from the point of view of science, but as a moral and social imperative.

My conversation with Wen Stephenson:

China's Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World's Wines

But what happens when two countries, two trading partners do not have parity on the production of a particular product, but have interlocking and conflicting needs, jealously, interests and misunderstandings?  The results, can create a crisis on a global level..even if the product is wine.

That’s the story my guest Suzanne Mustacich tells in Thirsty Dragon: China's Lust for Bordeaux and the Threat to the World's Best Wines.  It’s the story of China's quest to become a global wine power, France's Bordeaux region seeking to hang on to past glory and China expanding its tentacles into places like the Napa Valley.

My conversation with Suzanne Mustacich:

Why Lincoln would be appalled by today's income inequality

How many of the candidates that are running for President today, have the depth of character and ideas that, if they were to be elected, we still might be talking about them, studying them and being surprised by them, 150 years after their death?  The answer is probably none.

That is certainly not the case with Abraham Lincoln.  150 years after his death, people like esteemed Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer are still plowing the depths of Lincoln's convictions and portraying what he accomplished.

Convictions and ideas that are, in spite of the best efforts of Lincoln’s own party today, still part of the fabric of America. Holzer displays these ideas in A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity

My conversation with Harold Holzer:

How Art Shapes our Nature

We live in this world usually someplace between the mundane and the absurd. But regardless of which, it's one that is probably organized to the Nth degree.  Our technology is almost embedded in our personal DNA, in order to keep us on task. 

But is all this structure an impediment to creativity?  And if so, where might we get back to our youthful sense of play, of wonder and of discovery.

For some, it’s in travel and visiting strange places and the strange surroundings that take us out of ourselves.  For others, and often closer to home, it can be found in art; in what  Alve Noe refers to as the boredom of art.  

Art that unlike so much of culture, goes beyond surface and draws us in, sometimes to see the world in a brush stroke, a dance step, a well crafted sentence, or in a grain of sand.

Alve Noe takes this discussion of art to a new level in his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

My conversation with Alva Noe: 

Witchy Woman - Salem 1682

We think we know a lot about American history. About the events that shaped the formation of the republic. And while that knowledge might get you an audition for Jeopardy, at its roots sometimes, it's also true that everything we think we know is wrong.  

Essentially what that means, and maybe it's even a factor in what’s gone so wrong today, is that we tend to know only surface.  That when we drill down to historical events, only then do we find that the facts, the nuances, the subtlety and the psychology are what really matters. This is what 

really makes up the historical ripples we are living with today.

This is the story of the Salem Witch Trials, as told now by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stacy Schiff.  She won the Pulitzer for her book Cleopatra, and now she pivots to 1692 Salem to bring us The Witches: Salem, 1692

My conversation with Stacy Schiff: 

The Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

It used to be, during the dark days of the Cold War, watching the Kremlin and trying to read meaning into every nuance, tea leaf and coming and going, was elevated to an art form.

Today, it’s the same for the Fed.  Every meeting, every utterance of the Fed Chair and Fed Governors is parsed and analyzed and poured over for some hint of what the Fed will do and what it might mean for the markets, for the economy and for the politics of the country.

But it wasn’t always so.  In the aftermath of the 1907 financial panic, Congress created the Federal Reserve.  They did so for reasons not dissimilar to the state of our transitional economy today. But they did so in a spirit of compromise and national unity that seems a very far cry from anything that might happen today.

Putting all of this in its proper perspective is Roger Lowenstein in his new book America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

My conversation with Roger Lowenstein:  

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We’ve seen that different cities often emerge as the the center of their times.  This has been true from the Greek city states, through the Roman Empire and right up until the present, here in America. It seems that every major cultural, social and political movement of the modern era seems to be anchored in its own place.

New York became a kind of capital of the 50’s.  In the 60’s places like San Francisco and Berkeley were the center of gravity.  New York and to a certain extent L.A. seemed to launch the post war economy of the 70’s.  Washington seemed to dominate the 80’s and with the decline of New York, it seemed like the 80’s would belong to L.A.

But something happened.  Something that moved the locus of the knowledge economy to San Francisco and the Bay Area.

What happened and why is at the core of the years of research done by Michael Storper and his colleagues and put forth in their book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles.

My conversation with Michael Storper: 

Eric Bogosian tells of the plot that avenged the Armenian Genocide

Everything starts somewhere.  Even very bad things.

Many of the tremors we face today had their roots in the Ottoman Empire, in the run up to the First World War.  In what’s come to be called the Armenian genocide. 

There we began to see the rise of Muslim extremism, the battle for post WWI borders in the Middle East, the plight of refugees, the competition between national and corporate interests, particularly big oil, the Israeli/Palestinian  conundrum, and even acts of heroism in the face of seemingly improbable odds.  All of these things had their roots 100 years ago in the first genocide of the 20th century.

What we have forgotten is that for those that perpetrated it, there was a price to pay.  A small band of brothers set out to avenge the death of the million-plus people killed in that Armenian Genocide.

Now Eric Bogosian captures the essence of the story in Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide.

My conversation with Eric Bogosian: 

Can the under two hour marathon be accomplished?

This Sunday over 50,000 people will run in the NYC Marathon. For many participants, part of the appeal is to be part of something larger and more personal than a Facebook group.  For others it’s about achieving a personal best.  But for a much smaller group of elite marathon runners, it’s about what once seemed the impossible dream...breaking the two hour mark for the 26 miles through the streets of New York.

Why this goal is important, how long has it has hung over the sport and why is it now within reach?  All these questions and more are part of Ed Ceasar’s book Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.

My conversation with Ed Caesar: 

Is Robin Cook afraid to go to the Hospital?

Most of us will go into the hospital at some point. When we do, we might be subject to anesthesia, even for a minor procedures.  What goes on while we're asleep is, at least to the patient, a complete mystery. 

At the same time, we look to the technology of medicine as the panacea to solve so many of our health problems.  Yet when it goes wrong we get angry.  Clearly, our emotional nexus with technology is out of balance with our intellectual understanding of it.  In medicine, the price we pay, often with the simplest of procedures, is fear, alienation, confusion and a degree of appropriate paranoia.

Few understand this better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook.  He has used this imbalance to scare the bejesus out of us in his book like Cell, Nano, Coma, Cure, and Fever. Now in his latest work, Host, he once again walks us through the cost benefit analysis of medical technology falling into the wrong hands.

My conversation with Robin Cook: