Talk Cocktail

How Change Happens

We often say that actions have consequence. So do ideas. And we don’t always know the full extent of those consequences. Just as the science of splitting the atom, changed the nature of geopolitics and may still reshaped civilization, so the ripple effects of certain inventions have consequences and impacts, far beyond what was originally thought or intended.

As we worry about the spread of disease these days, it provides an interesting analogy. Essentially, if we think of certain inventions as Patient Zero, we then see how they spread over vast landscapes and change the world.

It is through this lens that Steven Johnson views the world in How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World.

My conversation with Steven Johnson:

A new perspective on the Middle East

When we think and talk about the Middle East today, we look at it terms of the religious and ethnic strife and extremism that define today's conflicts. We also assume that these conflicts has been going on for centuries.  That the holy wars and clash of civilizations of today have been the basis for the whole history of the region

Middle East historian Brian Catlos has a different view. One that puts those conflicts in a more political and economic perspective. In fact, it was really a world of conflict about money and land and power, and where interfaith cooperation was possible and where globalization may have gotten its real start.

Can understanding this helps us face today's challenges?  I don’t know; but we do know that perhaps it’s the beginning of wisdom. Catlos explains it in Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad.

My conversation with Brian Catlos:

Cosby

The recent suicide of Robin Williams puts into bold perspective that we really don’t know very much about the inner lives of the people that make us laugh. From Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor, from Johnny Carson to Bill Cosby, the demons and private lives that drove these comedians were often anything but funny.

Cosby was particularly unique in several ways.  He broke the color barrier for television with I Spy.  He appealed to predominantly white audiences, yet subtly advanced the civil rights agenda. He broke the rules, yet didn’t shout while he was doing it.  The Cosby show has become a part of American iconography and some would argue paved the way for the election of Barack Obama.

But what we know about his influential comedian has been mostly underwater. That is until journalist Mark Whitaker now pulls it all together in his new biography Cosby: His Life and Times

My conversation with Mark Whitaker:  

How many scandals can we understand at once?

If you’ve ever borrowed money for anything, from a mortgage to a student loan, you’ve been impacted by LIBOR.  The London Interbank Offered Rate.  The global standard for interest rates.

The problem is, like so many other recent aspects of our financial markets, we’ve now come to find that it’s been rigged.  That a system built on trust, has been anything but trustworthy. That the gentlemanly system of the London bankers has joined the international movement toward greed, and dishonesty, at the expense of average citizens around the world.

This story has been reported extensively by financial reporter Erin Arvedlund.  Now she pulls it all together in her new book Open Secret: The Global Banking Conspiracy That Swindled Investors Out of Billions.

My conversation with Erin Arvedlund:

Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow

When we talk about America's history of segregation, its not just about race and class, but also about geography.  Even as the civil right movement would begin to take hold in the late 60’s and seventies, there were parts of America, particularly in the rural South, that we untouched by that progress.  Places where slavery was not just a legacy to be overcome, but still in the fabric of the cultural DNA of place.

It is into this landscape that a young boy grows up, prematurely comes of age due to familial sexual abuse and yet has the strength, courage, and intelligence to make it out. To become not just a pillar of the NY Times editorial page, but a man brave enough  share his sometimes painful story.  That man is Charles Blow. His new memoir is Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

My conversation with Charles Blow: 

Writing in the 21st Century

Years ago, in Hollywood, someone once remarked that the amount of bad screenplay writing increased with the advent of the copy machine.  The same claim was later made when word processing and screenwriting software came along.

The fact is there is a lot of bad writing that goes on in many arenas.  Today much of the blame gets heaped on email, or texting, or technology, or just “kids today.”   The real issues are more nuanced, more complex, and not quite as rigid as some might wish.

These are some of the conclusions of Harvard Professor Steven Pinker in his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Persons Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

My conversation with Steven Pinker: 

Gratitude & Trust

The world is a crazy place.  Everyday here we talk about all the forces that are impacting us, making life more complex, confusing and making so many people less sure of who they are, how they fit in, and whether the decisions they make lead them in the right direction.

Sure, many people want to change their lives.  But for others, it’s simply a matter of trying to find true north.  Of seeing the guide posts or the modern day yellow brick road that will lead to a sense of certainty and security.

For many that road is about Gratitude and Trust, the title of a new book by Paul Williams and Tracey Jackson.

My conversation with Paul Williams and Tracey Jackson:

The world's first tech start-up

Socrates was worried about the rise of written text. He feared that it would change our habits of mind and not allow us to remember.

The printing press would spark another revolution, as mass produced text would change the world.  Not unlike our current digital revolution, the push back was fierce and loud.

And because history does repeat itself, we can indeed learn a lot by looking back at the last great technological revolution in publishing.  One that gave birth to the publishing industry itself, and that today, fights for its place in the digital tsunami.

Journalist Alix Christie takes us back to this momentous time, 500+ years ago, in her debut historical novel Gutenberg's Apprentice.

My conversation with Alix Christie:

How technology is reshaping philosophy

We've all played the game of thinking about and listing the most important inventions in the progress of mankind.  Certainly from the wheel, to the printing press to the transistor, there are plenty to choose from.

But seldom do we think about philosophical revolutions.  The invention of ideas and philosophies and habits of mind, that have also changed the world.

Of these, there have been less. Perhaps, according to Luciano Floridi, only three that have truly shaped our conception of the world and who we are within it

Oxford philosophy Professor Luciano Floridi argues that the technological and information revolution of today, has created a rare  Fourth Revolution, from which we now view ourselves and our place in the world. A world in which we shape our reality and that reality in turn shapes us.

My conversation with Luciano Floridi:

Foreign Correspondent

Once upon a time we got our international news through the relentless reporting of foreign correspondent.   The Vietnam war may have brought war into our living rooms for the first time,  but reporters still provided context.  Citizens would come to understand events through the consistency of work from a reporter, though time and experience.

Today, that foreign correspondent, satirized by Evelyn Waugh and celebrated by Hitchcock is an endangered species.  

Today the freelance reporter, dashing about and multitasking media, looking at events on a one off basis, may not have the same contextual understanding.

As a result, we tend to look at distant events without the benefit of context or connection.  The result is that our mistakes and failure appears untethered from each other and this, coupled with our short memories and even shorter attention spans, prevents the foreign correspondent  from providing that first draft of history.

HDS Greenway has been an eyewitness to some of the most profound events of our times, including the fall of Saigon,  ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and the horrors of both gulf wars. Now he shares his remarkable career as a Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir

My conversation with HDS Greenway: 

Words to eat by

Few things ignite all of our senses to the degree that food does.  Once simply a form of sustenance, food today, in restaurants or in markets, represents status, sexuality, politics, and education. Where all of this comes together, is not just in taste, or smell, or texture, but in the language that is used by purveyors of food, and the language that we all use, in talking about food. 

Stanford linguistics Professor and MacArther Fellow, Dan Jurafsky gives us a menu to interpret this in The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.

My conversation with Dan Jurafsky:

This is your brain on narcissism.

Like it or not, the nature of our society and of our culture today is focused inward.  Walk down any urban street, vs. 40 years ago and instead of looking out, we’re look down or inward.  At our phones, our images, at our own world.  

In a culture where self branding is celebrated, where selfies rule and Millennials are self absorbed, is it any wonder that narcissism seems rampant? 

But is this just a societal phase, resulting in the kind of prolonged adolescence that A.O. Scott talked about in his NY Times essay, or is it a clinical epidemic that needs more serious attention? Jeffrey Kluger examines these changes in The Narcissist Next Door: Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed,in Your World.

My conversation with Jeffrey Kluger:

Instant Gratification and the Decline of Institutions

It seems quaint now, but there was a time we had to rely on others for most of our needs.  We had to rely on family for food, operators to place calls, travel agents to book travel, the post office to deliver mail, and large institutions to fulfill our needs.

The technological revolution that began in the 70’s changed all that.  As consumers, as individuals we become empowered.  We could do our own thing, we could customize our lives.

But this new found power was a little like an 18 year old going off to college. A new freedom that would often result in excess.  That excess, for us as a society, has been the self absorption that it has engendered.

But that’s changing. The millennial generation is both self absorbed AND one of most compassionate.  It is arguably the bridge in a maturing culture that is coming to grips with this new found power.  

These are some of the core issues that Paul Roberts writes about in his new book, The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification

My conversation with Paul Roberts:

Technology, IS making us smarter!

If we were to listen to many of the Cassandras out there today, you would think that technology, information, and progress were all bad.

They are the same people who would have objected to the printing press, the telephone, television and the automobile.

They look at education and don't understand why memorization and rote learning are no longer worthy of attention and want to put the technology genie back in the bottle.

Well, it's not going back in!  In fact, much of what we have wrought as a society and as a civilization has made us better, smarter, and awakened whole new aspects of human potential.  Journalist Clive Thompson makes the case in 

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

My conversation with Clive Thompson: 

Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence

It seems that every generation seeks to find fault with the adolescent generation coming of age.  Just as the parents of boomers eschewed the 60’s, so today, we boomers are all too quick to criticize and disparage the state of Millennials.

Perhaps if we better understood adolescence, the process that the brain goes through as it remodels itself, we’d better understand the young adults that are coming of age.

And while we are quick to judge  what seems to be the extension of adolescence today, new research shows that the extension of adolescence is actually the extension of the plasticity of the brain which allow it to continue to be enhanced and invigorated.

Understand all of this has been the work of Dr. Laurence Steinberg in Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence.

My conversation with Dr. Laurence Steinberg: 

Why do we celebrate diversity, and then try and co-opt it?

Be it immigration, race or sexual orientation, we have an odd human tendency to expect that tolerance and integration to really mean sameness.

The idea of a social, political and cultural melting pot is often seen as the primary metaphor for accepting difference, as opposed to … well just accepting and appreciating differences.

Perhaps nowhere has this been more profound than for gays and lesbians.  Once shunned, now we look to gay marriage, child rearing and fashion, as a kind of establishment model.

In short, human beings  love to co opt difference and seek sameness.

But what impact does this have on individuals who may be different?  Individuals whose ideas, values, creativity, and life style seek to really be different?

That is one of the issues that Julie Bindel takes up in Straight Expectations

My conversation with Julie Bindel:

The New Capital of Big Data

Is there anyone that believes that we still have a measure of privacy?  Not only are there cameras everywhere, not only is big data a part of almost every business, but the uses of the this data, not by the NSA, but by corporate America, are becoming ever more sophisticated.

After all, it’s what we say we want.  Better customer service, better consumer satisfaction and greater personalization. After all, when you look up something on Amazon or Google and then you see ads for that item within seconds, on every website you visit, maybe it seems to go a bit too far.

No place is better at this, particularly in the bricks and mortar world, than Las Vegas. A place where money and service are as one, where loyalty still seems to matter and where the world of tech and the world of touch come together, as in few other places.

This is the backdrop for an Adam Tanner's look at big data, in What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal DataLifeblood of Big Business and the End of Privacy as We Know It.

My conversation with Adam Tanner:

The Boys In The Boat

Think about some of the great themes and conflicts of our times.  Freedom vs. Tyranny, the 1% vs the 99%, East Coast values. vs the Western ethos, team effort vs individual effort, the US vs Russia, the triumph of the Greatest Generation, craftsmanship vs mass production, and the moral as well as physical victory of America in the Second World War.

All of these themes and more are part of the story that Daniel James Brown weaves together in his bestselling The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Reminding us that the story of Jesse Owens was not the only American triumph to emerge from the 1936 Olympics. The victory of the Boys in the Boat, the University of Washing crew team, would happen, right under Hitler’s watchful gaze.

My conversation with Daniel James Brown: 

The 9/11 generation

As we approach this anniversary of 9/11, it's worth noting that the Afghan war has become the longest in American history. Also, to think about how many of the men and women who have served in that war, were motivated and inspired to act, by those events thirteen years ago.

Michael Golembesky is one of those.  He would go on to become one of the first members of the US Marines Special Operations Team, that was created in 2006.

His story, his eight years of service, is a telling snapshot of both the good and bad of our efforts in Afghanistan.

He shares the personal and military nuances of his story in his memoir Level Zero Heroes: The Story of U.S. Marine Special Operations in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan.

My conversation with Michael Golembesky:

The Gold Rush...then and now

When we talk about success, be it on Wall Street, or Silicon Valley, or even the boom in natural gas, we always talk about it as “the new gold rush."  In part because the Gold Rush represented the mobility, energy and adventure of Americans in pursuit of riches.

But those riches, that began in California in 1849, were anything but easy.  While many made fortunes, many of those fortunes came to those who took care of the hundreds of thousands who would come looking to change their lives.

That’s the world that Edward Dolnick writes about in The Rush: America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853

My conversation with Edward Dolnick:  

Do we need a constitutional amendment to take money out of politics?

Election day 2014 is fast approaching.  At the end of the process, we will have spent over three hundred million dollars to decide if Mitch McConnell or Harry Reid will have a two vote margin.

While there are many social, political and psychological reasons for our current state of political gridlock and polarization, money is certainly at the core.

The next Presidential election could well cost over one and a quarter billion dollars. It costs ten million, at the very least, to become a US Senator and even House races cost millions.

We’ve long talked about the corrosive effect of money in politics, and Citizens United has only reinforced that.  But both sides are raising and spending the money with equal alacrity, and the public shows no signs of being fed up enough, to do anything about it.

If it continues, what does it really mean for democracy has we have known it, what kind of government will it give us, and will there ever come a tipping point for an angry and disaffected public?  Those are some of the question that Tim Kuhner raises in Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution.

My conversation with Tim Kuhner: 

Don't watch another Football game, until you listen to this!

Once upon a time, our national pastime had nine innings, a long season, a pastoral setting and the worship and appreciation of the Boys of Summer.

Today, that pastime has been replaced by 60 minutes of intense violence.  With words like blitz and gridiron.  Where once stadiums had an ambulance standing by for fans that might have a medical emergency, today, the ambulance is there for the players whose concussions and broken bones and worse, are the norm. What’s worse, is that is also a game that children want to play.

I guess we shouldn't’ be surprised that a culture that reveres “Bullets and Burgers” would turn to football as its new national pastime.  Put more succinctly, is football driving the decay of our culture, or has our culture provided the perfect storm for the explosion of football's success?

Former sports journalist Steve Almond, in Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto,

takes a look at the decay and corruption that is football today. A sport perhaps more in need of a warden than a commissioner. 

My conversation with Steve Almond:

The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

We are deep in the heart of back to school season. Therefore, it's worth noting that while we have had dozens and dozens of conversations, on this program, about the improvement and mechanics of education, about its need to transform itself into a modern world, rarely have we ever stepped back to examine or even question the purpose of that education.  In part, because the answer today, almost seems like a paraphrase of Bill Clinton,... It’s the career  stupid!

But should it be?  Should there be a higher and more noble purpose, particularly for higher education?  As education moves more and more toward modeling the work force, that is being about collaboration and problem solving, are we losing something?

Has the worship of STEM and Wall Street, and the abandonment of the traditional Liberal Arts education left us in a lurch, whose implications have rippled out to impact almost every aspect of society.

If that’s true... then there is no app for that.  There is only the conversation started by William Deresiewicz in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

My conversation with William Deresiewicz:

What deeper learning is all about

While the world is changing around us, while creative destruction consumes so many areas, sometimes it seems like education stagnates.  After all, many, if not most, of our schools still operate in a manner designed in an agrarian world; pre Internet, pre technology and long before we knew and understood how the brain was wired, how children or anyone else really learns.

The good news is we are beginning to see progress.  All across the country bold, persistent experiments are taking place that are creating schools that set the stage for the future of education.

One such school is the Ron Clark Academy in Southeast Atlanta. It has been called one of the best schools in America.

It’s co-founder Kim Bearden has taught over 2000 student and has been involved in virtually all aspects of education.  Now she distills much of what she’s learned in her new book, Crash Course: The Life Lessons My Students Taught Me.

My conversation with Kim Bearden:

Change or perish in education...How to build a better teacher

Almost every aspect of our culture and economy has been touched by technology and creative destruction. Still, three areas have lagged behind, and all three are beginning to be addressed and changed.  They are finance, healthcare and education.

Although incumbents still rule in healthcare and finance, the ground is beginning to shift.  But in education, less so.  The very fact that we are still debating the merits and sanctity of practices that date to the agrarian age, is telling.

But change is happening.  Throughout the country small individual efforts are being made.  Efforts that reexamine the questions at the very foundation of learning of understanding and putting knowledge to use. 

One thing that hasn’t changed, is that teachers are still on the front lines.  For them too, it will be change or perish.   

Elizabeth Green takes a deep look into this change, in Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works.

My conversation with Elizabeth Green:

Information....adapt or perish

So much of the way our brains and nervous system are hardwired, emerges as man did, from the primordial stew of life. Clearly, modern science tells us we are more suited to be hunter gatherers than we are multitasking and purveyors of Google Glass.

Yet no matter how much some may desire it, we are not going back to a simpler time.  Information will continue to pore in on us, multilateral demands on our time will increase, and to succeed at anything, work, play or home, we will have to adapt or perish.

So the question becomes, do we try and shape this brave new world to fit the way we are, or do we move through life, knowing we are on the ramparts of the efforts to change human evolution?

The answer is really both.  This is where esteemed neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin takes us in his new book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.

My conversation with Daniel Levitin: 

The Power of Creative Pairs - The Powers of Two

Ginger Roger once said, of her partnership with Fred Astaire, that she did everything he did, “but backwards and in high heels.”  In many ways this gets to the heart of partnerships.  Two people that have a similar mission, but see it perhaps in opposite and positively reinforcing ways.

The examples are course legend.  Jobs and Wozniak, Lennon & McCartney, Parker and Stone, Larry and Sergei, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Crick and Watson, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Hewlett & Packard, to name just a few.

When you look at the list, it becomes clear that there is something special about the power of two. Is it an accident, or something inherent in the creative process?  That’s the focus of Joshua Wolf Shenk’s new book, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs.

My conversation with Joshua Wolf Shenk:

The Real Cost of Fracking

Across the country, fracking—the extraction of natural gas by hydraulic fracturing—is being touted as the nation’s answer to energy independence.  Energy companies have repeatedly assured us that the process is safe,

But is there a hidden cost, a hidden danger?  What really is the process of fracking and what are its consequence on people, the environment and those that come in contact with it?

Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald, combine their expertise in a new look at how contamination at drilling sites translates into ill health and heartbreak for both families and their pets. 

In The Real Cost of Fracking: How America's Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food, they give voice to the people at ground zero of the fracking debate, the authors illustrate what they believe to be the consequences of fracking, which In their view,  poses a dire threat to the air we breathe, the water we drink, and even our food supply.

My conversation with Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald:

The fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan

We often think of the 60’s as a time when the left was in the ascendancy. When great social movements, like the women's movement, the antiwar movement and the civil rights movement were given their birth.  In fact, arguably, the most lasting legacy of the 60’s maybe the rise of modern conservatism.

The history of modern conservatism and of the current Republican party has its beginnings in the early 1960’s and continues into the confusion we see in the party today.

Rick Perlstein has been one of our most astute chroniclers of that history,  beginning with his examination of Barry Goldwater in Before the Storm, and through his look at the 60’s and 70’s in Nixonland.

Now Pearlstein takes us to the next phase, in his examination of the handoff of the party from Nixon to Reagan in The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

But more than a political story, it’s the story of the transformation of America. A time when America suffered its first military defeat, was shocked by the oil crisis, the hostage crises, inflation, stagflation, a criminal Presidency, a rogue CIA, and more.  But it also became a time when as a solution to our multiple problems, reality gave way to fantasy; when facts gave way to fiction, when like television or the movies, make believe would take us to the place we’d rather be. And leading that transformation was Ronald Reagan.

My conversation with Rick Perlstein:

Have we reached the end of American community?

The world has changed.  We can intimately and immediately know what's taking place in the far reaches of the world or across America. But we often don’t know what’s going on with our neighbors and in our own community.

Today we are a part of many communities of interest, not necessarily communities of geography. And is it any surprise really?  The natural human tendency is to associate with people like us. But  as mobility and tolerance have allowed a diversity of communities, it has, in fact, atomized us in ways that we seek the similar, no matter where on the planet it might be.

But what is the consequence of this?  We were once a great and vast continental nation, that had to rely on community as a form of safety and self govemment.  Today that’s not the case.  The result has impacted our relationships, or politics, and the very way we govern ourselves.

Where it’s going and how we got here is the subject The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, a brilliant new book by Marc Dunkelman.

My conversation with Marc Dunkelman:

Have we reached The End of Absence?

There once was a time before the internet, before the automobile, before air conditioning, and television and radio and even before the printing press.  All these inventions and many others, dramatically transformed the ways in which we live.  At the time each was criticized for the ruinous impact it would have.  The printing press was thought to be the end of religion, air conditioning would keep us inside, and not allow us to connect with others. The automobile would destroy community and  television would pollute our brains.

The fact is that each of these inventions changed us and changed the way we lived.  And the result was not good or bad.  It was just different.  It was all part of the process of human evolution.  Ever since man first emerged from the cave, we have been engaged in an ongoing effort to try and shape and define  our man made environment, just  as it continues to try shape and define us.  

Michael Harris thinks we need to reclaim some of that lost world. He details his ideas in The End of Absence: Reclaiming What Weve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.

My conversation with Michael Harris:

Three Women at Home and at War

Those that have been through it, say that the experience of being in a combat zone is like no other. It is all consuming.  In so many ways it eliminates the real world of life and its mundane everyday chores and problems.  

Yet the men and women engaged in that effort, bring with them a life experience composed of precisely those problems.  Sometimes the military is a means of escape, sometimes a training ground for life, frequently life changing.  Yet most soldiers, men and women alike, must return to that real world. And when they do, everything changes once again.

That’s the story that Helen Thorpe tells about three women in Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War.

My conversation with Helen Thorpe:

Looking at Feguson through the eyes of the South in 1964

Fifty years ago this summer, Americans, both black and white, gave their last full measure of devotion in an effort to register African American voters in Mississippi.

The violence that resulted, the death of three civil rights workers, the beatings, the church bombings, and effort to prevent Americans from voting is a stain that shall forever be remembered.

For those that have forgotten, or were not alive in that period, A new work by Matt Herron is a powerful reminder.  Matt was the progenitor of an effort to chronicle those events and in so doing captured a pivotal moment in American history.  The result, is Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project

My conversation with Matt Herron: 

Do you believe in magic?

Perhaps it’s the state of the world today, but everywhere fantasy seems to be in ascendancy.  The retelling of Narnia, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and Lev Grossman’s The Magician series, all speak to what seems to be a compelling need.  

Lev Grossman has just published the third and final installment in his series, entitled The Magician's Land: A Novel.

My conversation with Lev Grossman: 

Can we ever achieve a shared truth about the legacy of slavery?

When Barack Obama was elected President, we heard lots of loose talk about this being a post racial society.  It was as if a magic pill had taken the issue of race and identity out of our consciousness.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, arguably, we are further behind in erasing our racial legacy than other parts of the world. And part of that reason is that we have yet to achieve a shared truth about the American experience of slavery and bigotry.

While we've done a good job of trying to move beyond that legacy, like a weed, not pulled out from the root, it comes back to haunt us, because of our difficulty in dealing with its true history.

That’s the history that Chris Tomlinson takes on, with respect to his own family, in his book and in the documentary Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families who Share the Tomlinson Name - One White, One Black.

My conversation with Chris Tomlinson: 

What did he know and when did he know it....is a Nixon defense even possible?

For  40 years, the Focus of the conversations about Watergate has been what did the President know and when did he know it.  The revelations from the release of and the listening to more and more of the 3700 hours of White House tapes, has pretty much now clarified that issues.

What still remains very murky, perhaps because it exists in both the realms of psychology as well as fact, is why.  Why did Nixon insist on the tapes, why didn’t he destroy them, and deeper still, why did a man whose entire life was devoted to the pursuit of the Presidency and his own place in history, destroy himself, by his own hand, his own actions and his own decisions?

Few have gotten closer to answering these questions than John Dean.  Nixon’s White House council,  the man who first told Nixon that Watergate was a growing “cancer on the Presidency,” who himself  has spent 40 years thinking and writing about these issues, now on the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, has written the definitive, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.

My conversation with John Dean: 

What did he know and when did he know it....is a Nixon defense even possible?

For  40 years, the Focus of the conversations about Watergate has been what did the President know and when did he know it.  The revelations from the release of and the listening to more and more of the 3700 hours of White House tapes, has pretty much now clarified that issues.

What still remains very murky, perhaps because it exists in both the realms of psychology as well as fact, is why.  Why did Nixon insist on the tapes, why didn’t he destroy them, and deeper still, why did a man whose entire life was devoted to the pursuit of the Presidency and his own place in history, destroy himself, by his own hand, his own actions and his own decisions?

Few have gotten closer to answering these questions than John Dean.  Nixon’s White House council,  the man who first told Nixon that Watergate was a growing “cancer on the Presidency,” who himself  has spent 40 years thinking and writing about these issues, now on the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, has written the definitive, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.

My conversation with John Dean: 

Is our long national nightmare over yet?

For journalists, for historians, and for political junkies, Richard Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving.  There are over 3700 hours of Nixon tapes and only a portion have been released and deconstructed.  

Even as we mark this 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation,  most of us have only heard a few minutes here or there.  For Luke Nichter, a Professor at A & M University, and one of the preeminent experts on the Nixon tapes, it paints a picture of a cunning and controlling President, and sometimes a country astride the world. But mostly it captures the White House, America and the world, in a particular place and time that bears very little resemblance to the world today.

The latest collection of Nixon tapes, assembled by Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley, is The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972.

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My conversation with Luke Nichter: 

The deep trouble of exploration

From the undersea adventures of Jules Verne, to Peter Benchley’s The Deep to Jim Cameron’s The Abyss, we flock to movies and literature that takes place underwater.  We are fascinated by, but know so little about, the undersea world.  

In fact, a recent review of  James Nestor’s book, reminds us that if something disappears on Mars or the Moon, we’d have a better chance of finding it, than if it disappeared in the world’s oceans.

This fascination has given rise to whole groups of people that seek to explore in new and different, and sometimes dangerous, ways.  

That's the backdrop of James Nestor's Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves.

My conversation with James Nestor: 

The ecological history of greater New York

In communities all across America debates rage about zoning, building, and development.  In most cases, however, the debate is around the margins.  Most places have long since evolved into what they are.  New York City is perhaps the penultimate example. 

While arguments still do go on about height limits, shadows and railyards, the city has long since determined its destiny. For New York it has been, at least since the mid 18th century, a forward march to becoming the amazing city it is today.

Ted Steinberg's Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, gives us a detailed history of that urban evolution.

My conversation with Ted Steinberg: