Talk Cocktail

Sometimes the reality of war is just too complex and absurd to be understood in real time.  Perhaps that why books about war are so powerful and important.  That’s why novels like  Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5, The Things they Carried, A Rumor of War, and The Yellow Birds, have been essential for our understating.

Equally important to our understand is grasping the impact of PTSD on those who served or who, for whatever reasons, journeyed into the heart of darkness that is combat.  

While embedded with troops in Iraq, journalist David Morris almost died when a Humvee he was riding in encountered an IED. His book, explores his own trauma from that event, as well as the history and science of post-traumatic stress disorder.The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

My conversation with David J. Morris:

As music and the music business evolves today, the content of the music often plays second fiddle to the debate about economics.   About digital royalties, performance royalties, Pandora, Spotify, etc.  In many way the medium impacts the message, the songs we hear and what gets produced and what becomes popular.

And why not?  After all, it is the music business!  In fact, it always has been a business, but one balanced precariously on the fulcrum of popular taste.

Where those two ideas and trends intersect, is usually responsible for the kind of music we get.

All of this went through a revolutionary shift in the post war years, another time of creative destruction in the business of music. The results of which, changed music forever.

Professor and journalist Ben Yagoda examines this time in The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song

My conversation with Ben Yagoda: 

Revolutions are hard AND exciting. They combine courage and new ideas and the excitement of once in a generation change. However what’s even harder, is what comes next. The way in which the apogee of a moment of revolutionary fervor sticks and is translated into changes in government and in bureaucratic institutions. And perhaps most importantly, the way in which the multilateral ideas of the divergent revolutionaries come together to shape it, accommodate and compromise.

We know from our own American revolution how difficult that can be. Think about it. We are still impacted by mistakes or compromises made by our founders over a 139 years ago.

Four years ago this month, the revolution in Tahrir Square began a tectonic shift. In Egypt and in the Middle East. How it happened, how it’s played out and the acts of individual action, courage and diversity lie at the heart of Thanassis Cambanis' new book Once Upon A Revolution: An Egyptian Story

My conversation with Thanassia Cambanis: 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, defines personality as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”  Certainly that is the outer manifestation.  But science, brain research and  cutting edge psychology tells us that it's all part of a much more complex overall system.  A system that shapes our lives, our identities and our emotions.  It's a system that determines that the way in which we understand ourselves and our own personalities, shapes how we view and interact with others.

This is the work of John D. Mayer  the renowned psychologist who co-developed the groundbreaking theory of emotional intelligence, and now looks even deeper into personality in Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives.

My conversation with John D. Mayer:

American political history is a complex and dynamic process.  In that process, there have been periods of entropy and period of great progress and imagination.  Both have been a function of a political system designed by our founders. 

But also, the temper and tenor of the times and the degree to which individual leaders have known how to work those levers of power has also shaped our political destiny.

The period of the Johnson Presidency, post 1964, is one of those period.  The Great Society, The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, medicare and medicare, are all just a part of an agenda that reshaped America

Today as we face congressional gridlock, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the apogee of the civil right movement, and as the president goes before Congress tonight. As we reassess our politics and institutions, its well worth the time to look at that unique and politically bountiful period of the Johnson Presidency.

That is what historian Julian Zelizer does in his new book The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.

My conversation with Julian Zelizer: 

So many of the weaknesses of our media today are blamed on the digital revolution.  Certainly the transition to digital has rendered change.  But to a large extent those changes only magnify some of the fundamental flaws that afflicted American media as it evolved in the 20th century

The weakening of regulation, the increased power of the free market to shape coverage of news and the increasing conflating of news and entertainment ALL added to the mix.  Today, those forces, combined with the impact of technology has, for better or worse, created a landscape that some would argue, is antithetical to even the minimal requirements of a democratic society.

This is the landscape that Professor Victor Pickard explores in America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform.

My conversation with Victor Pickard:

Our nation was founded in opposition to dynasty.  

From the push back to George III, to our concerns about another Bush/Clinton Presidential race, Americans have always been suspicious of the dynastic impulse.

Yet today, we seem to be smothered in a dynasty of the elites.  Even while the politics of the fringes gets all the media attention, the centers of power in both political parties seem fixed to support candidates and policies that further the social and economic interest of the "one percent."

Sitting astride this tendency for over fifty years has been the Bush family.  The degree to which their influence and power has shaped events, is the subject of Russ Baker's book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

My conversation with Russ Baker: 

Just as we demand a lot from our political leaders today, we also demand a lot from CEOs. Even if they are not founders,  they need to be telegenic, charismatic, visionary, have a detailed plan, and adept at working the politics of the boardroom.   They need to be comfortable in being a part of the one percent, have media coaches and PR people and be on a short leash from  quarter to quarter.

Today, the CEOs that rise to that definition are few: Jamie Dimon, Tim Cook, Alan Mulally, Jeffrey Immelt and Marissa Mayer.  Perhaps of all of these, Marissa Mayer came to her job with the least preparation and some of the highest expectations.  Perhaps that is why, large parts of the public are fascinated by her every move, from fighting insurgent Yahoo shareholders, to gracing the pages of Vogue.

Nicholas Carlson, chief correspondent for Business Insider has written  Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo. The first in depth look at Mayer and her rise from the nerdy girl at science camp, to the CEO of a 30 billion company, by age 38.

My conversation with Nicholas Carlson:

We live in an age in which everything has become politicized.  The coffee we drink, the food we eat, the shows and movies we watch, and the cars we buy,

all seem to convey some kind of political message.

Where once these things represented class, or taste, or education, today it’s all about politics.  Even in non-partisan races, political ideology becomes the central issue.

So what impact does this have on our ability to teach politics, or citizenship or democracy or even science in the classroom? Paula McAvoy examines not only the impact, but a way into this discussion that can perhaps transcend or even co-opt our partisan divide.  She details it in The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education.

My conversation with Paula McAvoy: 

The industrial revolution changed the world.  It changed the nature of work, it displaced workers, it ushered in the Gilded Age and created more inequality.  It shrank the world, drove consumerism, and reshaped political ideology.

The Internet revolution, 150 years later, has had  startling  similar effects.  We worship at the altar of creative destruction, we fetishize technology and the freedom and democratization that the Internet had promised.  But at what price?  

Simply, can the same technology and companies that fractured and reshaped the world, now be what we need to put it back together again?

Andrew Keen, argues that The Internet Is Not the Answer.

My conversation with Andrew Keen: 

Long before radio, I spent years in Hollywood.  This was just as the Word Processor and the high volume copy machine were taking hold.  When those things came along, everyone joked that screenwriting software and easy access to copying machines would lower the quality of screenplays.  Little did those jokesters know, that was just the beginning.

Not only did the medium become the message, it subsumed the message.  The medium, the technology, the process in fact became the creative endeavor.  Today it’s Apps and coding and creative destruction.  

And yes, technology makes life better, cheaper, faster and sometimes does allow more time for creativity.  But is there something we have lost in the process?

Without getting stuck in the tired morass of, "the old days were better," is there some objective thing we have lost in our culture, in our selves or  in our intellectual DNA?

Former LA Times arts and culture reporter Scott Timberg takes up these issues and more in Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

My conversation with Scott Timberg:  

It was Churchill who said that when the present sits in judgment of the past, we loose the future.  Obviously not the attitude of memoirists.

But also not the attitude of someone who looks back on the totality of one's life and tries to understand who they are and where they came from.  

Barbara Ehrenreich discovered, late in life, a journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence. She writes about a mystical experience, that to her rational and atheist self today, was nothing less than shattering.  In Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything, she reconstructs her childhood, beginning with the perspective of a young girls obsession with important questions.

My conversation with Barbara Ehrenreich:

When something goes wrong with a car or an appliance, or even the human body, the “instructions” for repair are often clear. However my guest argues that the manual that tries to define the parameters and terms of mental illness, is without that kind of scientific basis. He says that even an auto repair manual, much less a biology textbook, has more science than the DMS 5

Yet with the fifth volume of the DSM, and the concurrent explosion in psychotropic drugs, Doctors are relying on it, more than ever. In fact, it may actually be detrimental to taking care of our mental health.

Leading the criticism of DSM 5, is Dr. Allen Francis, a man who was one of the purveyors of the previous DSM 4.  Part of his criticism is that we are over diagnosing and sometimes making normal into something that needs to be treated. 

His book, recently out in paperback is Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.

My conversation, from earlier this year, with Dr. Allen Francis:  

What might our knowledge of history be like if snapchat had been around in earlier centuries?

The good news is that it wasn’t.  In a time when people wrote letters, not texts or emails, those letters got saved and later curated.  Letters that give us little glimpses into personalities, history and the human condition at another time, in another place.

Shawn Usher, has devoted himself to being a curator of many such letters.  He is the founder of the blog, Letters of Note and now that’s been turned into the book  Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience.

My conversation with Shawn Usher: 

Remembering the early days of the cell of phone, we all remember, “can you hear me now.”  For most of us this was modern nuisance.  But for some, those that are hearing impaired, or profoundly deaf, those words have far greater meaning.  

While much progress has been made in the technology, treatment and study of deafness, we are just beginning to understand the broader implications, with respect to brain development, literacy and the very ideas surrounding the acquisition of language.

This is the world that Lydia Denworth became immersed in with her son Alex.  She talks about that experience in I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey through the Science of Sound and Language.

My conversation with Lydia Denworth: 

What would it take for you to give up your Western lifestyle, move to Ghana, live in a mud hut and commit yourself to helping thousands of lost children?

You would think that this kind of thing only happens in the movies, or in literature. That real lives are generally not a kind of fairy tail.

Not true.  Lisa Lovatt-Smith did exactly that.  She traded in her glamorous life in Paris and a glamorous life at Vogue for the experience of moving with her daughter to Ghana and trying to change the world. 

She’s shares her story in Who Knows Tomorrow: A Memoir of Finding Family among the Lost Children of Africa.

My conversation with Lisa Lovatt-Smith: 

To achieve proficiency in a new language late in life is near impossible.  But suppose you didn’t just want to learn the language, you wanted total immersion.  You wanted to learn the culture, the origins of the language, to become one with the language.  That’s what my guest William Alexander set out to do with French.

He wanted to be French and language was simply the vessel. But even with that kind of commitment, the effort almost broke his heart. He tells of that effort in Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart.

My conversation with William Alexander: 

It used to be that the classroom prepared you for a career.  Today your lifetime career is a classroom, where you must be continuously learning.  In doing so, the horizons open up and opportunities abound.

The traditional straightjacket of education and career have been, like most things, disrupted. In it’s place, possibility and creative destruction..

Along with this comes a whole new way of doing business.  A place, not unlike sports, where the newcomer, the rookie has an important role to play.  Without Joe Panik, the SF Giants don’t win a world series.  

In today business world, information isn’t siloed or hidden.  It’s available for all, and it gives the rookie a more level playing field in which to work, bring new ideas and new ways of looking at the world.

This is the back drop for Liz Wiseman's look at    Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.

My conversation with Liz Wiseman: 

One of the foundations of the changing nature of education, is the idea of deeper learning.  Direct, hands on mastery of content, though solving real world problems in a collaborative way. This has created dramatic results in all academic areas.

But it’s also something that can take place right at home.  That’s what best selling author Mark Kurlansky did with his daughter Talia.  They combined culture, geography, chemistry and all in the context of preparing  delicious meals.  

Now they share their efforts in  International Night: A Father and Daughter Cook Their Way Around the World.

My conversation with Mark and Talia Kurlansky: 

To dream the impossible dream has been the great engine of progress in the world.  From the early explorers, to scientists and engineers, to man's quest to explore the planets.  The story of exploration is the story of mankind.  

When John Kennedy laid down the predicate of reaching the moon by the end of a decade, he defined for the whole county that kind of clear goal that also drives individuals forward.  

The story of some of these individuals, along with his own quest,  is what Chris Guillebeau writes about in The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life.

My conversation with Chris Guillebeau: 

Conventional wisdom has long held that we live in a vast and indeed expanding universe, in which we humans are but a seemingly small and insignificant part.  

But in that classic view, are we not giving ourselves enough credit? Perhaps we are more unique than we think.  Perhaps we are not all that ordinary, on a not so ordinary rock in the vast cosmos.  

Just maybe, that classic view, needs to be reexamined.  That is what Caleb Scharf has done in his new book The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities.

My conversation with Caleb Scharf:

Perhaps part of what plagues us when we think about most issues today, is that we tend to see them in very myopic ways.  The world is a more and more complex place, and yet we do the opposite of what we should do.  We too often silo information or categories, or problems.  

We don’t always see the connections and therefore we get frustrated, because we can’t seem to solve the problems.  

Environmental issues are no different.  My guest, one of the fathers of the environmental movement,  James "Gus" Speth, believes that when we talk about environmentalism, it’s more than the air, or the water, or the earth.  That there is a holistic approach we need to take that is  essential if we want to solve anything.

He writes about this in the context of his own history in his memoir Angels by the River.

My conversation with Gus Speth: 

How often does a story leap off the pages of a magazine, to become a book, a documentary and a major motion picture?  Very rarely. And when it does, it’s clear that the story it tells has touched a powerful nerve among readers and viewers.  

Such is the story that Wired  Contributing Editor Joshua Davis tells, of four underdogs from the streets of Phoenix, who, using Spare Parts would take on the best High School and College students in the country, including MIT with the resources of Exxon/Mobil.

My conversation with Joshua Davis:

We’ve recently seen year end lists of the best places to work.  Free food, massage, pets, and a beautiful campus are all contributing factors.  However, research, behavioral analysis and science can also tell us what make a workplace effective, productive, and more innovative.

The famed management consultant Peter Drucker said that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Affirming a long held conviction that the culture of a company, even more than its smarts or its products, drive its success or failure.

Part of that culture, built into the DNA of every company, it the work environments it provides its people.

That where my gust Social Psychologist Ron Friedman picks up the story in The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

My conversation with Ron Friedman: 

While the origins of the quote are sketchy, Harry Truman, frustrated by the problems he faced in the White House, is reported to have said that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

Today the same might be said of our pets in general, or in the politically correct parlance of the day, our companion animals.  Be they dogs, or cats.

With all the talk about  the amount of money spend on our pets, it’s easy to lose sight of the real power of our relationships with them.  Sometimes exalted, sometimes mocked, the fact is that in a society where alienation is common, where complexity often rules, where self absorption defines a whole generation, those human/animal connections can be transcendent.

That’s the personal story and the connection that Lissa Warren writes about in The Good Luck Cat: How a Cat Saved a Family, and a Family Saved a Cat.

My conversation with Lissa Warren:

Back in the 1940’s theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the serenity prayer. You all know it. It tells us to accept those things that we can’t change and the courage to change those we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Over the years, it’s been adopted by AA and various other groups. But it might also be the coda for Cheryl Strayed's fantastically successful book  Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

The story of her trek on the Pacific Crest Trail, it’s also the story of coming of age and Cheryl's journey out of her own heart of darkness. The book is out in paperback and it is now a major motion picture.

My conversation with Cheryl Strayed:

During the recent Ebola scare, we were often reminded of the dozens of science fiction thrillers that set the stage for our fears.  From the Andromeda Strain, to World War Z, The Stand and The Hot Zone, to name just a few.

Today, the cutting edge of genetic manipulation, often provides the basis for similar fears.  The brave new world of Bioengineering, plays upon our most primal instincts of what makes us human.

Jamie Metzl a former member of the National Security Council,  has added his new thriller to this long tradition.  Set against the worlds of politics, finance and religion,     Genesis Code, takes its place in fuelling our paranoia.

My conversation with Jamie Metzl:

We live in an ironic age.  The speed of modern communication, juxtaposed with the traditional entrenched problems we face, provides a disconnect that only humor can bridge.

Think about it this way. How often has humor engaged us to better understand tragedy?  How long after certain tragedies, do we hear the first joke?  Not out of disrespect, but out of a way to get our arms around something that our brains have trouble comprehending.

When David Letterman asked, after 9/11, if we would ever laugh again, he was going to the heart of the role humor and satire play in our society.

From Mark Twain to Will Rogers, from Mort Sahl to Stephen Colbert, satire has been a translator of the American experience. 

Sophia McClennen dishes it up in Is Satire Saving Our Nation?: Mockery and American Politics.

My conversation with Sophia McClennen:  

Even amidst the concerns about the impact of cattle on global warming, the disgrace of industrialized farming and slaughterhouses, and the increased worldwide population that has sworn off beef, it’s still very much a part of our diet.  

And perhaps it should be.  But is there a better, more sustainable, more humane way to process that beef and bring it to market? 

In what too often seems to be world of black and white thinking, can we find a middle ground?  A way in which beef is healthy, sustainable, humane and actually good for us and the environment?  Nicolette Hahn Niman thinks so. Her book about what she has discovered is 

Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production

My conversation with Nicolette Hahn Niman:

John Wanamaker, the famous department store magnate, once said that he knew that at least half of his advertising budget was wasted.  Problem was, he didn’t know which half. 

For anybody that’s in business today, you know how difficult it is making your product or service stand out among the competition and noise of today’s marketplace. It’s a lot tougher than it was for Don Draper.

Advertising is everywhere.  Television, radio, billboards, digital, banners, mobile, native advertising, telemarketing, and pop ups.  It’s on everything that isn’t implanted into us….and that may be not that far away.

So what works.  What is, in the buzzword of the day, authentic, effective and creates real Return on Investment?  

One of the most powerful tools of the marketer has always been word of mouth.  Social media and things like Yelp, have only amplified that power. 

But is word of mouth marketing just some random confluence of events, or can it be shaped, molded and directed in ways that are both authentic, and beneficial to both seller and buyer?

This has been the work that Ted Wright talks about in Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth

My conversation with Ted Wright:

I can’t even count the number of times that guests on this program have spoken about what’s become known as the Marshmallow Experiments.  In conversations ranging from business, to public policy, to personal psychology, the impact of this experiment in determining self control, executive function, the predilection for addiction and even intelligence, has been profound.

Walter Mischel started thinking about this experiment when he was in graduate school. Later, in the 60’s at Stanford, he devised what's become known as the Marshmallow Experiment, to assess the ability of children to delay gratification.

Since then, 50 years of in depth research have both enhanced and expanded the scope and knowledge that began with this simple experiment.  After all these years, Mischel has written about it in The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.

My conversation with Walter Mischel: 

We live in an information age.  The goal of virtually every App on our phone, and most websites, is perfect information; about the world, about our neighbors, about our friends and about ourselves.

So how is it, that with all this information, the world is so much more dangerous.  That secrets are sometimes so much deeper, that bad actors, and even good ones turned bad, can often outsmart, out run and out maneuver the CIA, the very agency designed to ferret out those secrets and keep us safe.

Even as the very first tenants move into the new World Trade Center, we’ve come to appreciate the importance and value of human intelligence.  But those that engage in it are often at risk both from their enemies and their friends.

Few understand this better than former CIA operative Valerie Palme.  Her life and career was derailed, in public view, as much by friends as by her enemies. Valerie Plame’s career continues through the work and efforts of her fictional alter ego Vanessa Pierson.

Pierson made her debut in Blowback, and now she’s back in Burned.

My conversation with Valerie Plame:  

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.

A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act on issues that had been previously frozen

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, “sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.”

But often these problems come out of the blue; in life and in business.  When they do, when those pivotal moments happen, it’s the culture, the people, the mission, in short the underpinning of the organization itself, that must become its survival mechanism, as well as the jumping off point for its future.

So just as we might prep for physical disasters, why not prepare and build an origination for the stress of those moments. That's one of the lessons from Malachi O'Connor and Barry Dornfeld in The Moment You Can't Ignore: When Big Trouble Leads to a Great Future.

My conversation with Malachi O'Connor and Barry Dornfeld:

Someone once remarked that when they saw a snake and a vulture having sex in Washington, and thought it was just business as usual.  Fitzgerald said that he rich were different, because they have more money. Politicians are different, usually because that they have more insecurities

The fact is that most politicians and other high profile inhabitants of our nation's capital are just flesh and blood human beings. And yes, they may be different than you and I, they are certainly more caught up in their unbroken series of successful gestures, but most do care about their work.

In fact, some care too much.  As the late, great journalist Richard Ben Cramer once wrote, that feeling you can make a difference is like a drug.   Also a great journalist, Mark Leibovich, has been been giving us great insights about the power players in Washington for the NY Times Magazine. Those profiles are part of his new book Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles in Courage and Self-Delusion.

My conversation with Mark Leibovich:

Recently we spoke of the 50 Anniversary of Freedom Summer and the early flowering of the civil rights movement.  Much has been written of the historical roots and narrative of those events. But now Jacqueline Woodson tells her personal story and the larger story of the journey of a movement from the Deep South, to urban core of America.  

The story of   Brown Girl Dreaming is a story made all the more powerful by recent events that bring into focus the arc of that journey. A journey that ended short of its target.

My conversation with Jacqueline Woodson:

When we do think about the state or origins of language, we often think about it as something based in the distant past.  But language is very much a living thing, with a direct nexus to our cultural evolution.   The choices we make about the words we use, reflect both our own place in the culture as well as the state of the culture itself.

This is all part of the unique work of Princeton Professor Daniel Cloud in The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal.

My conversation with Professor Daniel Cloud: 

As we listened to election results last week, the one thing we heard over and over again is the slicing and dicing of the electorate.  Into generations, incomes, ethnicity, etc.

Certainly we hear repeatedly about the complexity and challenges of today's multi- generational workplace.

With all of this talk about division, it's perhaps worth looking at what might actually unite us.  There is an answer we might find surprising, and that is technology.  To paraphrase the old orange juice commercial;  technology, it’s not just for Millennials anymore.

In fact, the use and strategic advantage of technology may be the most unifying forces for all us. That's the conclusion reached by Thomas Koulopoulos and Dan Keldsen in The Gen Z Effect: The Six Forces Shaping the Future of Business.

My conversation with Thomas Koulopoulos:

In a business environment as data driven as ours is today, it’s not surprising that we don’t view success through the lens that Fitzgerald used to describe Gatsby, who saw his success as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

Still success to be sustainable and replicable, both personal and professional, has to be more than habit or behavior, or just data. 

In a world in which changes take place so quickly, in which workforce diversity both generational and ethnic, is so varied, the traditional solutions to problems are not always applicable.

As we often hear said about the military, you can’t fight the next war with the lessons learned from the last one

That’s why design and intentions are so important as tools for driving both leaders and their organizations.

That's what Mindy Hall focuses on in Leading with Intention: Every Moment Is a Choice

My conversation with Mindy Hall: 

If the past 30 years of television has been about anything, it’s been about specialization.  While ESPN was the leader and Granddaddy of specialty television programming, you can now watch nothing but Sci Fi, or old movies, or cartoons, and of course food.

Food programming, like sports has had a cultural impact far beyond the screen. The Food Network, like ESPN, has both shaped our perceptions and married it with our culture in ways that gives us both celebrities and food.  What better combination for 21st Century America.

Allen Salkin looks at his history in From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network

My conversation with Allen Salkin:  

Throughout history, from Cesar thru Lincoln,  from Archduke Ferdinand and Gandhi through the Kennedys and Malcolm X, a bullet has changed the world.

But what’s different when assassination is not a random deranged act, but an instrument of policy.  First, it’s the stuff of movies.  Think about it;  The Manchurian Candidate, Day of the Jackal, Executive Action, Parallax View, to name a few.  Add to this list, Syriana, a story based on the life of former CIA operative Robert Baer.

Baer has now codified his unique line of work in The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

My conversation with Robert Baer: