Talk Cocktail

There is seemingly nothing in our society today that has not become politicized. From what bathrooms we use to the soda we drink, to the food we eat.  Sometimes if feels as if common sense and good judgment have gone out the window.

We forget there are some absolutes.  There are some facts that are irrefutable. Sometimes to ignore this, is to do irreparable damage.  One of the areas where this is certainly true is with respect to the environment.

Where once protecting the natural environment was a conservative value, today for conservatives attacking those that seek to protect the environment has become an applause line.

For environmental activists, their extreme views, their disregard for business and property rights have helped to push the reaction on the other side.

In short there is plenty of blame to go around. However renowned lawyer Frederic Rich doesn't assess blame.  Instead, in his book Getting to Green: Saving Nature, he looks for a bipartisan answer.

My conversation with Frederic Rich:

American history shows us that amidst election season we are often divided.  That partisan rancor is often high and it is a healthy part of the passion of democracy.  But today we seem to have something worse.  While we’ve been here before as a county, we are at one of those historical inflection points where the bitterness spills over into every aspect of life. 

And while history shows us other bitter splits, today, the long tail of the Internet and technology has made us more tribal.  More prone to confirmation bias and only associating with our own tribe.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said we are all entitled to our opinions, but not our own facts.  Today, the proliferation of information, has made everyone feel empowered by their own facts, true or false.

We live in a world that William Butler Yeats writes about when he said that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction and worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Mark Gerzon, like Barack Obama thinks he can change that.  He outlines his plans in The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide.

My conversation with Mark Gerzon:  

As they have done in so many other areas, the millennial generation has picked and chosen which parts of their social and sexual legacy they want to inherit.  Particularly for millennial girls who were handed a legacy of sexual revolution, increased efforts to promote self esteem, Title 9, several waves of feminism and the ability to Lean In, they have made some interesting choices and compromises for themselves.

Nowhere is this more profound and more complicated than in their navigation of their own sexuality. How this plays out in our culture, how it impacts our daughters and what is says for the future of men women and sex is at the heart of Peggy Orenstein's new book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.

My conversation with Peggy Orenstein:

If I gave you all a quiz and asked you to name five tech visionaries and entrepreneurs in the US, you’d all pass.  If I asked you to name even one visionary entrepreneur in China, the world's largest market, you’d probably come up empty.  If you didn't, you’d probably name Jack Ma, the founder and leader of Alibaba.

The company recently went public in the largest IPO in history. It’s the largest virtual shopping mall in the world and it’s impact not just in China, but in the developing world, is profound and impactful both economically and politically.  

Longtime  businessman and journalist Duncan Clark takes us up close and person with Jack Ma in Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

My conversation with Duncan Clark: 

It’s funny how history often pokes its head out in the framework of contemporary events.  Remember during the government shutdown a few years ago, commentators said that the radical elements of the GOP were acting like terrorists from the 60’s and 70’s?  We heard similar criticism of occupy Wall Street years ago. And who can forget the President being accused of paling  around with terrorist because of an acquaintance with  Bill Ayers.

That fact is that the idea of direct action, grassroots support and commitment to ideas of social change, no matter how flawed, were an essential part of America in the 70’s 

Inspired by the communist revolutions in Cuba and China and Vietnam, by the actions of the Nixon administration and the war in Vietnam,  a radical group of revolutionaries sought to launch what they believed to be a 2nd American Revolution.

Today, to look back upon it, is to be shocked by the level of violence that the public came of accept as commonplace and how the efforts of law enforcement to stop it, were almost keystone cops like.

Taking us back to this bizarre time in modern American history is award winning author and journalist Bryan Burrough, in his book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

My conversation with Bryan Burrough:  

The debate that raged between Apple and the Federal Government was on the surface about security, privacy and encryption.  However, in a larger sense it’s about the balance between our liberty and right to privacy vs. what some perceive as the greater good of the nation.

When we put up with the indignities of the TSA, we are agreeing that the greater good of security, check makes certain individual liberties.  When we pass laws about personal vices, about speed limits or about guns or fundamental civil rights, the framework is the same.

In fact, when we look at the history of America, right on through our present day polarization, we see this struggle between individual liberty and the common good as a fundamental debate that links us directly with our founders.

This is the tension that Colin Woodard writes about in American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.

My conversation with Colin Woodard:

For most of us, the pressures of daily life in the 21st Century are intense.  Emails, calls, social media, commutes, every changing technology, all on 24/7.

Regardless of the economic and social discussion from all of this, there is the question of the impact it’s all having on our bodies and on our psyche.  Given how slow evolution moves, can human psychobiology cope with all of this?

That’s why some people practice things like meditation and mindfulness.  But how does that really help?  Dr. Andrew Newberg, has spent his career studying the impact of religion, spirituality and enlightenment on our physical and mental health.   In his latest work How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation,

 he looks at the power of what he defines as enlightenment to truly remodel who we are.

My conversation with Andrew Newberg: 

T.S. 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 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?

Does the fault lie in the technology, the speed at which information comes at us, or an evolutionary limitation to process information that has not yet caught up with technology? Or is it simply fear of the new, and fear of the future.

This is what Michael Patrick Lynch addresses in The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data

My conversation with Michael Patrick Lynch: 

When we examine the roots of today’s chaos in the Republican party, we see that much of it has been caused by the party using and manipulating social issues to hold together Red State voters, while ignoring and even acting counter to their real economic concerns. This was the premise of one of the seminal books of our modern political age, What’s the Matter with Kansas, by my guest Thomas Frank.

Today, Frank argues that the Democratic party is facing a similar situation and is ignoring a whole swath of it’s traditional working class base voters. 

He argues in his new book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

that the traditional working class Democratic voters, the ones  that drove the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson coalitions, have been ignored.  That the traditional Democratic Dunkin Donuts/ Walmart voter has been replaced by the Starbucks/Whole Foods voter.  And that o

once again, even in the Democratic party, social issues have been used to  transcended the real economic needs and distress of Americans.

To some extent this has given rise to the Bernie Sanders movement. But more specifically it’s left the door open for a populist demagogue like Donald Trump, to take advantage of this openings on both side of the political equation. 

My conversation with Thomas Frank:

A popular desire for authoritarian rule in the face of a changing and sometimes shaky economy. A overheated sense of nationalism, to cover up uncertainty about the future. Scapegoating and military adventurism as a salve for a lack of purpose and policy, a dislike of outsiders and a desire to crackdown on journalists to cover up anger about the changing nature of employment.  Sounds like a certain candidate running for President of the US.  In fact, it is a picture of the rise of Vladimir Putin and Russia, as Russia still comes to grips with the change heralded by the Soviet collapse.

But to fully understand Putin and Russia, it's important to look beyond Moscow, just as it’s necessary to look past Manhattan or San Francisco to try and understand America.

Long time NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has spent decades exploring  the Russia that’s far from Moscow, in what some might call the Russian heartland.

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russiais her story of twenty plus years of reporting from a town on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. She reveals a Russia that today embraces a unique combination of Western goods, inherent corruption, and authoritarian rule

My conversation with Anne Garrels: 

Just for fun, pull out or get a copy of the originally published version of the best seller What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally published in 1970, virtually no job that it listed that even touches technology, is even close to the same today.  Remember that came out 46 years ago,  just as the boomers were going into the workforce.

Today’s changes, human, technological and social, are happening at a geometrically much faster pace.  Imagine then what the workplace will look like 46 years from now.

Children entering school today will work in a world that has almost no relationship to today's world.  The jobs, the skills, the workplace and the products will be vastly different.

Given this, how do we plan? How to we teach our kids, shape public policy and prepare for a fourth industrial revolution that will happen, even if we do nothing to get ahead of it.

Alec Ross, one of America’s leading experts on innovation, served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  He’s the author of The Industries of the Future.

My conversation with Alex Ross: 

We've all heard it before. Sixty is the new fifty, fifty is the new forty, etc.

It's all in the service our fear, or dread of aging; of death and the lost endless possibilities of youth. We believed that as we turned the corner onto the proverbial back nine, that a kind of midlife crisis would overtake us.

For a generation of narcissistic baby boomers, it seemed like the logical step. But a surprising thing happened along the way.  Many of those same baby boomers began to appreciate age and its companions of wisdom and calmness

Some boomers actually began to thrive in midlife and that's the story that Barbara Bradley Hagerty tells in Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife

My conversation with Barbara Bradley Hagerty: 

Andy Grove, perhaps more than anyone other than Steve Jobs transformed technology, drove the growth of Silicon Valley and shaped the views of so many of the people that run tech companies today.  To say that he was the Godfather of Silicon Valley would not be an understatement. 

Andy Grove, who passed away yesterday,  was one of the founders and CEO of Intel Corporation, where he transformed the role of semiconductors from an obscure part of tech, to almost a consumer product. 

He was also at the cutting edge of the computer and Internet revolution.  Back in 1996, twenty years ago, Grove wrote a book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.  It's still widely read and respected.

Upon the publication of that book in 1996, I had the chance to speak with Andy Grove.

At the time, WiFi didn’t exist, Hi Speed Internet was still a dream, and networks were reserved only for the biggest of corporations.  But Grove saw that key inflection points were coming.  He foresaw the change they would bring about the creative destruction that would result in the change that has swept the world today.

Here is a little of that 1996 conversation with Andy Grove:

If we examine why so many students don’t graduate High School, we find that failure to succeed at High School math is often at the core of the problem.  Yet we are told almost every day that STEM and that math are the keys to the kingdom of success in the 21st Century.

The fact is that most jobs, even very good ones, don't require the geometry, the algebra, the trigonometry that we  are forced to lean in High School.  What they do require is a hi

gh degree of numeric literacy, critical and quantitative thinking and the ability to fully understand computation.  

That’s not what we are teaching.  Math Professor Andrew Hacker, took on this subject back in 2012 in a NY Times op ed pieces and the controversy hasn’t stopped. 

Now he’s out with a book entitled The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.

My conversation with Andrew Hacker

The power and reach of corporate America has become a staple of our political dialogue.  Consolidation and corporatization has touched almost every area of our culture.  The Disneyfication of our communities is almost complete. Food,  retail, coffee, service, music, movies and now even sex and our most intimate fantasies. 

Where once strip clubs had unique and individual identities, fulfilling a wide range of fantasies, today even they have gone the way of corporate homogenization.  Jessica Berson has witnessed it up close and personal and in The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business she shares her story.

My conversation with Jessica Berson:

In this age of consumerism, instant gratification and information, it’s often hard to think about something as abstract as the “meaning of life.” The ideas of birth, death, and infinity, which used to introduce a popular television show of the early 60’s, are ideas seldom thought about today.

Yet these are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. Lee Eisenberg,  who previously looked at our relationship to money in The Number, now takes on these questions with even more enthusiasm than Monty Python did, in his new book The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between

My conversation with Lee Eisenberg:

Last week Elizabeth Warren gave a scathing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about the seven year efforts, on the part of Republicans, to delegitimize the Obama Presidency.  From the birther efforts to Mitch McConnell, saying that his goal, from day one, was to defeat Obama.

It’s not possible to carry on this discussion without accepting and understanding race as a part of it.The burden of being America's first black President, can’t even be imagined.

We know from the way this current campaign is playing out, how a large swath of white America has responded.  But how has the black community viewed Obama? Long time journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan takes a look in I Heart Obama

My conversation with Erin Kaplan: 

Today, globalization faces a crisis of its own success.  The international movement of goods, money, communications and ideas has been going on since even before the 12th Century.  However, today the context of that globalization has changed.

Where once driven individuals could change the world,  today the very complexity of the world that globalization has created means that it can no longer exist in an economic vacuum, free from the drag of domestic and geopolitics.

But to fully understand what we might need to do, we have to understand how we got here.  That’s the story that Jeffrey Garten tells in his new book  From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives.  Garten looks at ten people who have single handedly changed the world during the last 800 years.  It’s a kind of biography of globalization.

My conversation with Jeffrey Garten:

Money and politics have become synonymous.  Politicians spend that majority of their time raising money, (which they claim they hate) while the cost of campaigns escalates and more money is needed and more money needs to be raised.  And where does that money come from….not usually from small contributions, but from large and vested special interests.  

The result is a system that is inherently corrupt and tilted toward big money.  Even when it is practiced by the most sincere and dedicated elected officials.  

We all seem to know this...what we don't see as clearly is the way in which this simple, fundamental and relatively recent development is responsible for so much that’s wrong with our democracy.   Our wealth gap, political gridlock, inaction on some of our most pressing environmental issues, 

For focusing on this core idea, Bernie Sanders has been accused of being a single issues candidate.  But no matter where you stand on Sanders, it’s increasingly clear that this single issues is the foundational idea underlying the paralysis of 21st century America.

This is the issue that Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman take head on in Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It

My conversation with Potter and Penniman: 

It’s funny how history repeats itself.  In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life.  Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air.  The appropriately named Know Nothing Party  grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and filled the political dialogue with fear and hatred. 

But fortunately leaders emerged in the Irish community that showed them how to be Americas. One of those was Thomas Francis Meaghar. He would become not just an Irish hero, but an American hero. Sometimes forgotten he is given new life by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

My conversation with Timothy Egan:

With all the technology around today, doctors still often fail to make the right diagnosis.  Usually not due to any failure of knowledge or smarts, but because diagnostics is often as much art as science.

As such, it requires an almost intuitive and/or subtle understanding of the patient, his or her circumstances and sometimes it’s as much about what is not said by the patient, as that which is voiced.

Drs. Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz have taken these ideas to the next step in their research about art of context and diagnostics.  Their work is revealed in Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care.

My conversation with Dr. Saul Weiner and Dr. Alan Schwartz

Although, incorrectly attributed to Churchill, most of you have heard the quote that   "if you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart.  If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain."  While it’s a little silly, it does go to the core fact that personal beliefs can change as we grow, as we evolve and as context changes.  And while people like Jonathan Haidt have made the case that political belief is in some ways tied to evolutionary psychology and biology, we know from the lives of prominent Americans who have changed their beliefs, that this has it’s limits.

Writer and filmmaker Daniel Oppenheimer in  Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century looks at the lives of six prominent figures, not just whose politics have changed, but wholes ideas, and intellectual core beliefs shifted over time from left to right. In the process, they all profoundly impacted our political dialogue.

My conversation with Daniel Oppenheimer: 

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: 

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:

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:

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:

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:

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: 

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:

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:

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: 

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:

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:

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:

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:

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: 

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: 

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:

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:  

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.