Talk Cocktail

We are in the midst of a great migration to cities.  The number of farms and people engaged in agriculture continues to decline.  Yet human ingenuity has produced abundant resources of food, through innovation and technology.  

Historically, when disaster has struck and we have been threatened as a species, we’ve always seemed to find a way out, particularly with respect to our food supply.  This has resulted in increases in population, which then takes us to the next crises.

This cycle is replicated throughout history.  It is what MacArthur fellow and Columbia Professor, Ruth DeFries calls a cycle of Ratchets, Hatchets and Pivots.  She explains in her book The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.

My conversation with Ruth DeFries: 

Todays workplace bears very little resemblance to that of our parents.  It’s multi generational nature, its focus on employee empowerment and its reflection of broader changes in society, education and culture, all create a perfect storm that requires whole new skill sets from today’s leaders.  

These are the skills that Susan Fowler writes about in Why Motivating People Doesn't Work . . . and What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging

My conversation with Susan Fowler:

Back in the early 1960’s the world took note of the decadence of life in the Italian capital of Rome, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.   Inspired by two major political/sex scandals of the era, the film, which would win the 1960 Palme d'or in Cannes, depicted a Rome that was ultra sophisticated, ultra modern and ultra decadent.

Fifty plus years later, Prof. Roger Friedland would decide to move to Rome with his wife and adolescent daughters, because he saw Rome as an antidote to America being awash in sexuality, modernity, sophistication and decadence. He writes about his experience in Amore: An American Father's Roman Holiday

How have the tables switched so dramatically, and what does it say about the state of love, sex and popular culture in the 21st century.

My conversation with Roger Friedland: 

Almost no aspect of life has not been touched by the forward march of science and technology.  The world of sports is no exception.   When we watch a game, or even multiple games as in the Olympics, we want to see things we’ve never seen before. 

The narrative of human performance drives our love of any sport.  And today, science is glad to oblige. As we learn more about the brain, the body, genetics and biological evolution itself, scientists and engineers find news ways to enhance innate athletic ability.

It’s no accident that story abounded recently about how the newly minted World Champion SF Giants, had hired a sleep expert to advise them when it was best to travel.

So what’s going on now, and where will it all lead?  That's what Wired editor Mark Mcclusky set out to discover in his new book Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them.

My conversation with Mark McClusky: 

The Middle East is always ripe with stories.  Unfortunately, few get to the heart of the absurdity of the human condition there.  In much the way that Catch 22 or Mash did for our wartime military, The Hilltop, a new novel by esteemed Israeli writer Assaf Gavron, does for the settlements on the West Bank.

My conversation with Assaf Gavron:

How many of you have been asked recently to name your favorite or most influential books?  It’s a process that has been all the rage on social media. And while such lists have been around for a long time, perhaps what inspired this current flare up is New York Times Book Review Editor Pamela Paul’s weekly Q & A with authors and journalists in the BY THE BOOK feature in Sunday’s New York Times.

The feature is an all access pass into the private world of authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, and recommendations.

Now she brings together sixty-five of these exchanges, in their uncut and original form in By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review.

My conversation with Pamela Paul: 

The world of historical fiction always plays an interesting role.  On the one hand, it's an entertaining way for us to understand, often from 30k feet, the broad historical sweeps of history. But beyond that, it’s an opportunity for us to see, up close and personal, how conflict, change, stress, fear and intimacy affects the human condition. To see how others act, and to better understand and appreciate the diversity of humanity in our current world.

That's what Mark Fine has done in looking back at apartheid in South Africa in the late 1970's. He tells this story in The Zebra Affaire.

My conversation with Mark Fine:

Although it doesn’t seem like it in today's world of images and 140 characters, words, stories and literature once moved people and nations and changed the world.  In fact, even in our own nation, the act of reading was once even seen as subversive. Yet it fueled the quest for freedom,  fired up our democracy, and launched a nation.

Today that same nation and its discontents, seems to eschew literature as a form of creative engagement, of social discourse and as an element of citizenship.

How we got here and what it might mean for the future is part of the backdrop of Azar Nafisi’s new work The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books.

My conversation with Azar Nafisi:

As we watch day after day, the government response to a potential Ebola crisis, we are reminded of so many mistakes that various government agencies have made in response to other disasters. It hardly fills us with confidence.

Katrina, of course, remains in all our minds. And more recently Superstorm Sandy, exactly two years ago, where municipal response, particularly in N.Y. City, would have embarrassed even the Keystone Cops.

Kathryn Miles, in Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy, dives deep into Sandy.  What she tells us could, if we pay attention, save a lot of lives in the future.

My conversation with Kathryn Miles: 

There are many legacies of the 1960’s.  The Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the efforts of women to have reproductive choice. Of these, arguably the reproductive freedom of women has had the most profound, lasting and  global impact.

Before the efforts of four mismatched anti establishment characters in the 1960’s, women had, since the days of ancient Egypt, sought to control their biological destiny.  

And while today, we look at The Pill and birth control as the norm, the efforts to develop and market it were anything but normal.   In a time now when we think that an App on our phone can change the world, it’s worth looking back at something that truly did. That's what Jonathan Eig has done in The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.

My conversation with Jonathan Eig: 

When we think about the Supreme Court, and its hushed, hallowed halls, and John Adams dictum that we are a nation of laws and not of men, words that do not often come to mind are  passion, Salsa Dancing, ambition, and people skills.  Yet all of these have been a part of the life and Supreme Court tenure of Sonia Sotomayor.  

Her story is not just a legal story, it’s the story of the rise of the Latino population in America and it’s ever larger and growing role in the politics of the nation.

My guest Joan Biskupic tells that story in Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice

My conversation with Joan Biskupic:

Today, as we look around the world, it sometimes seems to be spinning out of control. It feels like a time, to quote Yates, when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, when the best lack all conviction and the worst seem full of passionate intensity.

Does the fault lie in the vagaries of human nature, or in our leaders and institutions?  The answer is that both are intimately linked in ways that, when fully understood, explain the essence of how the world works.

This is the journey that Francis Fukuyama takes us on in his two volume masterwork on political order.  He has just published the second volume, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

My conversation with Francis Fukuyama:

For a while now technology has seemed to focus on only one aspect or another of  information.  Everything from Google to Facebook, to Instagram, to all aspects of the sharing economy are essentially all about trying to achieve perfect information.

Slowly the emphasis is beginning to shift.  Now voice recognition,  robots, drones and a renewed interest in artificial intelligence are all pointing to a new technological direction.

Just as we’ve had to readjust to the creative destruction and social shifting of the information economy, now the the automation or AI economy is upon us.  What will it change?  How will it reshape the social contract and perhaps most of all, how will it reshape the nature of work? 

Nicholas Carr, the best selling author of THE SHALLOWS, and THE BIG SWITCH turns his attention to this future in his new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

My conversation with Nicholas Carr:  

Although the origins of the quote are a bit murky, the idea that the only way to predict the future is to invent it, certainly seems true in the 21st century. In fact, that future is being invented right now. 

As technology moves from dedicated devices, to virtually everything, soon everything from our pens to our trash to our kitchens to our most intimate desires, will be connected to the each other and to us, in ways unimagined until now. Will that technology be more humane or more intrusive?

David Rose is on the cutting edge of inventing that future and he details it in Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things.

My conversation with David Rose:

For those that study and write about politics, the holy grail is to find those seminal moments in the nation's public and political life that change everything.  And while the antecedents of those events may be years in the making, they usually create a perfect storm that results in an event that is a kind of tipping point;  one that marks a permanent tectonic shift in the political landscape.  Sometimes we have to let time pass, before we appreciate or even understand those moments. 

The televised Nixon-Kennedy Debate, Watergate, the Nixon’s resignation and the Vietnam war piped into our living rooms are such event.  And, according to longtime political journalist Matt Bai, the implosion of Gary Heart's presidential campaign in 1987, was also such a moment. One that Bai captures, in all its complexity, in All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.

It was a time when politics became a plotline, when the personal became both political and public, and when Who, What, Where and When became Gotcha.

My conversation with Matt Bai:

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 upon 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.

It could be said that climate change provides such an opportunity.  That in seeking to address the issues of man made climate change, we will have to drill down into the very issues that caused it in the first place. That’s what Naomi Klein does in her new work This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

My conversation with Naomi Klein: 

Some of you may have seen the story recently that marriage is at an all time low in America.  We also know that two out of three Americans are overweight, or obese.  Is there a link between these two issues?

Has our national physical decline and the rise of obesity changed the way we view love and sex, and if so, what are the broad social and economic impacts of that?

That’s what Sarah Varney, senior health policy correspondent with Kaiser Health News, sets out to find out in XL Love: How the Obesity Crisis Is Complicating America's Love Life.

My conversation with Sarah Varney

For decades, it seems, we've read and watched stories about suicide bombers in the Middle East. We process the information without emotion, as we do most news stories.  Then 9/11 happened and suddenly suicide bombers took on a new meaning for most Americans.  

With that new understanding, award winning journalist Mike Kelly looks back at a story of a suicide bombing in Israel, that took place in 1996, years before 9/11.  The story, fraught with the humanity and frustration of loss, would have, if we knew better than, presaged so much of what’s happened since….in Israel, in Palestine, and in America.  

Mike Kelly's story is Bus on Jaffa Road: A Story of Middle East Terrorism and the Search for Justice.

My conversation with Mike Kelly:

Whether we are thinking about our smart phones, or HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, we are usually deeply conflicted about artificial intelligence.  Will it be a panacea to enhance the already unique power of human intelligence or, like HAL, will its survival depend on usurping human control

That balance informs both our fear and appreciation of machines and technology and what they both can do. This is the balance that Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom seeks to find in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

My conversation with Nick Bostrom: 

Revolutions are often exciting.  The stir change, mobilize ideas, and are often at the cutting edge of excitement.  Yet what happens after revolutions is often the work that matters.  The problem is that it’s hard work.  The cameras are off, the story has grown cold, but this is where the work gets done that can truly change the world.

Arguably the women's movement is such an example.  While dramatic changes once took place, arguably the hard work since has not been quite enough

While the opportunities for elite women to “lean in,” have never been stronger, American women overall today, fare worse than men on virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety.

Sexual violence is still condoned, and reproductive rights are by no means secure. Women assume disproportionate burdens in the home and pay a heavy price in the workplace. 

Yet these issues are not political priorities. Nor is there a consensus that it’s even a problem. This is the story that Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode tells in What Women Want: An Agenda for the Women's Movement.

My conversation with Deborah L. Rhode:

The common portrayal of Millennials is as generation that is narcissistic, self absorbed, entitled and demanding.  Yet they are almost 90 million strong and will soon be taking their place in leadership in business, in politics and in almost every other aspect of society.

What will they be like in this new role?  How will they be when they are the boss?  That’s the situation that Lindsey Pollak looks at in Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders.

My conversation with Lindsey Pollak: 

Kierkegaard said that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.”  Such is the powerful value of memoir and reflection

Sometimes, though, that reflection takes in more than just the individual life, it becomes a way to reflect on a time, a place, and movement.  Gail Sheehy’s life encompasses all of that.  The mainstreaming of hippie culture, feminism, new journalism, publishing all exist side by side with the touchstones of love, loss and family.  Her story is, in short, the story of the past fifty years. The proverbial grain of sand that captures the history of the time.

Gail Sheehy shares her story in her new memoir Daring: My Passages: A Memoir

My conversation with Gail Sheehy:  

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:

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:

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:  

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:

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: 

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: 

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:

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:

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:

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: 

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:

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:

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:

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: 

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: 

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:

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:

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: