Talk Cocktail

Why Vietnam still matters

Think about the things that shape our world, our perceptions and our culture.  For a large part of the population, the experience of America’s mistakes in Vietnam has long shaped our engagement in the world.  The country's disrespect, at the time, for the service of those that served in Vietnam, in many ways positively shapes the way we respond to Veterans' needs today.

As leaders today try and juggle the crisis of the world, and play a kind of geopolitical chess, they are always chastened by the scandal that was Iran/Contra,

And as any magazine or look at popular culture today will tell you, we are obsessed with outward appearances, usually at the expense of depth and real understanding.

All of these issues and ideas come into play in the life and struggles of Robert Timberg.  

Disfigured in a land mine explosion thirteen days before he was to leave Vietnam, his story, his struggles and his recovery in many ways parallels the story of the past half century.

It’s what makes him so effective as a journalist and why his story, that he now tells us in his memoir Blue-Eyed Boy, is also a history lesson for us all.

My conversation with Robert Timberg:

Parenting 101 - Lead with Acceptance

Every generation of parents wants their children to do better than themselves.  It seems though that to accomplish that today, as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman and others have warned, "average is no longer good enough."

So how do we reconcile this with the data that tells us seeing our children for who they are and focusing on their social and emotional needs, is every bit as important as their academic needs.

How do we square that circle of success.  Nancy Rose explains in Raise the Child You've Got - Not the One You Want: Why Everyone Thrives When Parents Lead with Acceptance.

My conversation with Nancy Rose:

How good intentions created the student loan crisis

The student loan crisis has reached epic proportions. Beyond the basic fact that it could be the next financial cries, with debt exceeding one trillion dollars, its impact on higher education, at a time when that education is a prerequisite for today's employment market, makes the problem all the more profound and complicated.  It also makes it a matter of urgent attention in the realm of public policy.

Joel and Eric Best take a comprehensive look at the scope and history of the problem in The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem.

My conversation with Joel & Eric Best:

Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century

Suddenly talk of income equality and poverty has become more acceptable.  Perhaps it’s the political season, or Thomas Pikitty’s book, or perhaps it’s just the reality of what we see all around us in America.

But how does talk turn into action and what kind of action?  We see in Silicon Valley and in tech, in general, that when a company succeeds, or is bought out, all of the employees, all of the stakeholders benefit.  Why can’t that same idea apply to the rest of corporate America?

This is part of the idea of the The Citizen's Share: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century.

A new book and a new way to look at these issues by Joesph Blasi.  

My conversation with Joseph Blasi:

Good...Evil...Indifferent

It has been argued that more evil is committed in the name of banality, than purpose.  Certainly a look at our current golden age of television, confirms that. Don Draper,  Walter White, and Tony Soprano never really seem to make up their minds about being good or evil.

So what’s the zeitgeist of our culture that separates hero from villain and what's different today than say in the 90’s or even the 50’s?

Who better to ask than Chuck Klosterman, The Ethicist for the NY Times Magazine, and the bestselling author of seven previous books, including Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs no looks into our confusion about good and evil in I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)

My conversation with Chuck Klosterman: 

Do Fathers Matter?

When Hanna Rosin wrote The End of Men, did it also portend the end of fatherhood?  There is no question that gender roles have been dramatically changed in the past 50 years.  That in almost every measurable metric, women are not just pulling ahead of, but are surpassing men.

Yet fifty years of change, is no match for almost two million years of human evolution.  Where these two forces converge is the reality of modern fatherhood.

The scientific, genetic and evolutionary influence of fathers is powerful and provable.  Yet in many ways it runs headlong into popular culture, contemporary role models, and the reality of 21st century family life.

Journalist Paul Raeburn describes the current revolution in research in Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked

My conversation with Paul Raeburn:

Does the US have more A*holes today?

Everyday we encounter jerks.  Some have recently argued that the number of jerks has increased exponentially as we all experience greater stress and more frequent encounters, in denser urban environments.  But when those jerks go to far, than they truly become assholes.

But why so many, why now and what can we do about it?  That's the question that Aaron James asks in Assholes: A Theory.

My conversation with Aaron James:

How Immigration became illegal

Immigration has once again become the issue of the day.  Children are pouring across the border. Misinformation is rampant and our national attitude has become mean spirited.  We say we are a nation of immigrants, yet what we really mean by that seems very different than the current reality.  

We have a system that has grown inefficient, prejudicial and disconnected from the very human concerns of people seeking a better life. Aviva Chomsky has been active in Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights issues for over twenty-five years.  She examines where we are today in  Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.

My conversation with Aviva Chomsky: 

The Vacationers

It’s long been said that if you really want to get to know someone, travel with them. The corollary is that if you really want to get to know members of your family, go on a vacation with them.  The crucible of that experience usually brings out both the best and worst of who they are.  

That’s the pressure cooker that the Post family is thrown into in Emma Straub's. new novel The Vacationers.

It isn’t easy making it onto the New York Times bestseller list with your second novel, but Straub did it with The Vacationers — the perfect book to bring with you on your summer getaway.

My conversation with Emma Straub:

What happened to good seafood at a good price?

America has more ocean and more coastline than any other nation. We produce more fresh seafood than other nations. Yet the amount of seafood extracted from those oceans, that we keep here in the US, is very small. Why this disconnect? Why is our relationship to seafood so attenuated? And is there some connection or consistency between the decline of farming in America and the decline of domestically consumed seafood. Paul Greenberg takes us inside seafood and aquaculture in American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood. My conversation with Paul Greenberg:

How Millennials are changing the Middle East

Technology is transforming the world.  But so too are millions of young people throughout the Middle East, whose attitudes, desire for freedom and more cosmopolitan views, are transforming nations. When these forces combine, the results can be powerful.  This is what we’ve seen in the Arab Spring and in the uprisings and youth movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole, one of our most distinguished Middle East experts, talks of a rising Arab Generation Y, in his new book The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East.

My conversation with Juan Cole:

The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor

Living in the West, it's easy to forget that one-sixth of the world's population subsists without sustainable sources of food, medical care, or housing. 

More than a billion people around the world are believed to live on a dollar a day... or  less. While the circumstances leading to that sort of poverty are varied and complicated, the situations faced by the planet's poorest are depressingly familiar. 

Now we get an on the ground look at that world, in a new work by Thomas A. Nazario. He is the founder of a nonprofit The Forgotten International, and the author of the vividly reported and beautifully photographed, Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor.

My conversation with Thomas Nazario:

Is there any hope for the US / Iranian relationship?

Few nations have as long a history of uninterrupted conflict and misunderstanding as the United States and Iran.  The markers along that road are tall.  The US coup that installed the Shah, the hostage crisis, Khobar towers, Lebanon, holocaust denial and the continually failed US efforts to seize opportunities when presented by Iran, have all contributed.

The issue of US/Iranian relations have run through the center of American foreign policy for the past 60 years, through ten successive administrations, Republican and Democrat alike.

Yet with each successive effort or treatment, the disease always threatens to burst out and become full blown. This is where we are once again, in the nuclear talks in Vienna, and in an effort to stabilize Iraq and Syria.  

Are we at a new critical point in this relationship or is it all just another failed effort at rapprochement? Long time Iranian diplomat and now a Professor at Princeton, Seyed Hossein Mousavian thinks there is reason for optimism. He makes his case in Iran and The United States: An Insider's View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace.

My conversation with Seyed Hossein Mousavian:  

The real Chinese American experience

Several trends are shaping the world today.  One is immigration and migration.  The mass movement of peoples from rural to urban area and across borders, in search of a better life.

Concurrently, globalization and cultural homogenization are confusing the very idea of national identity.  As the recently concluded World Cup proved, we are deeply committed to our ethnic and geographic identity, and yet it’s all within the context of an increasingly borderless and global world

Inherent in this contradiction lies many issues faced by multi racial Americans and particularly Chinese Americans, torn between two models of success

Eric Liu’s story sits at the epicenter of these ideas. Ideas that form the basis of what we really should be discussing as part of our immigration conversation and what Eric talks about in A Chinaman's Chance: One Family's Journey and the Chinese American Dream.

My conversation with Eric Liu:

The beginning of an era and the end of innocence

For ten days in March 1971, the Rolling Stones traveled by train and bus to play two shows a night in many of the small theaters and town halls where their careers began. No backstage passes. No security. No sound checks or rehearsals. And only one journalist allowed. That journalist was Robert Greenfield and now, thirty-three years later,  he gives us his first an account of this landmark event, which marked the end of the first chapter of the Stones’ extraordinary career.

Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile is also the story of two artists on the precipice of mega stardom, power, and destruction. It was both the best of times and the worst of times for the music business and the end of innocence in music.

My conversation with Robert Greenfield: 

Where's the beef?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, that fault is not in our food, but in choices we make. Specifically about what we eat, where it comes from and the policy choices that surround it.

There is no questions that we are meat eaters.  But given the forces of big agriculture, and the fast food industry, we have to reassess not the practice of eating meat, but the kinds of meat we choose.  Things like factory farming, antibiotics, and many of the practices of the food industry, seek to undermine those choices.

Patrick Martins, one of the leaders of the sustainable food and slow food movement, sounds a clarion call to these issues in The Carnivore's Manifesto: Eating Well, Eating Responsibly, and Eating Meat

My conversation with Patrick Martins: 

How the immigrant feels

Immigration seems the issue on everyone's mind today.  Yet with all the thinking and all the talking, we forget half the story.  It’s not just about how the receiving country deals with new immigrants, it’s also about the immigrant’s experience and how that experience, especially for young children, will shape their lives, and in turn their contribution to and role in, the greater society of which they become a part.  

When we look at the mass migration to America’s shores at the beginning of the 20th century, we get a glimpse of how that plays out.  

Alex Tizon, came to America from the Philippines.  He would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the former Seattle bureau chief for the LA Times and currently teaches at the University of Oregon.  

His memoir of his immigrant experience is Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self

My conversation with Alex Tizon: 

A Spymaster's Story

It’s easy to forget that long before the intelligence failures of 9/11, the misinformation about Iraq's WMDs and what has become almost the militarization of the CIA,  the agency had done well as the bulwark of American Intelligence efforts in the Cold War and in helping to define America's place in the world.  

Perhaps there is no better way to look back at that effort, than through the lens of the CIA’s most Zelig like character, Jack Devine.

Devine served eleven Directors of the CIA.  He was there when Allende fell in Chile,  in the effort to aid the Mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in the morass of Iran/ Contra, in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, during the Haitian coup in 1991, and he ultimately served as leader of the Directorate of Operations, the nerve center of America’s covert operations worldwide.  He tells his fascinating story in Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

My conversation with Jack Devine:  

A Spymaster's Story

It’s easy to forget that long before the intelligence failures of 9/11, the misinformation about Iraq's WMDs and what has become almost the militarization of the CIA,  the agency had done well as the bulwark of American Intelligence efforts in the Cold War and in helping to define America's place in the world.  

Perhaps there is no better way to look back at that effort, than through the lens of the CIA’s most Zelig like character, Jack Devine.

Devine served eleven Directors of the CIA.  He was there when Allende fell in Chile,  in the effort to aid the Mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in the morass of Iran/ Contra, in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, during the Haitian coup in 1991, and he ultimately served as leader of the Directorate of Operations, the nerve center of America’s covert operations worldwide.  He tells his fascinating story in Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

My conversation with Jack Devine:  

Dead laws and broken government

We all know that our system of government is broken.  Mostly we attribute it to bickering and bitter partisanship.  But also, in part, it’s the fault of millions upon millions of pages of rules and regulations that seemingly govern every aspect of our lives. This is true on the local, state and national level.

Many of these rules are well meaning.  They were put in place to address a problem, or right a wrong or fix an imbalance, but the process has gotten out of hand and hardly kept pace with the progress of the world around them.  What we have now, not only stifles innovation, it increases cost and runs counter to some of of our most cherished principles and ideas as to what our country is about. Philip K. Howard, the author of The Death of Common Sense, takes a look at all of these rules in The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government.

My conversation with Philip K. Howard:

Why John Wayne still matters

Back in the last 1960’s there was a very famous ad campaign that asked, What Becomes a Legend Most?  In fact, the real answer to that question is not the fur coat that was advertised, but really, it’s for a real legend to have a good biographer.

John Wayne certainly fits the role of a legend.  Wayne's is a story filled with contradiction, misinformation and of course the conflating of fact and fiction.  Today, 35 years after his death, Wayne is still a bit of a mystery, even while still one of America's favorite movie stars.

What was it about Wayne, his image, his life and his movies, that interconnected so perfectly with his time and his country.

Scott Eyman, who previously has written about John Ford, turns his focus to Wayne in a new biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend

My conversation with Scott Eyman: 

The Bronx is calling

Whether you grew up in a big city or a small town, if you moved away and then went back to visit, years later, everything had probably changed.  

It probably triggered a kind of nostalgia that both made everything old new again, and at the same time reminded us that often the best way to go home again, is really in our imagination.

For Avery Corman, returning to the Bronx was not just an exercise in nostalgia, it was also a look at how the world and all of us have changed over the past half century. Corman details he experiences in My Old Neighborhood Remembered: A Memoir

My conversation with Avery Corman: 

The tangled roots of American independence

History is a funny thing.  Time goes by, books are written  and we think we know all there is to know about a particular time and place.  Yet the complexity we sometimes feel about ourselves and about modern life, is no less true for history.

The true interpretation of motives and events we thought we knew, is always evolving and surprising us.  This it is certainly true with with respect to our own American revolution.  

As we try to understand other revolutions and the yearning for independence in other parts of the world, perhaps we can better understand, when we see more clearly, our own history.

Thomas P. Slaughter has done this for the American Revolution in Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution

My conversation with Thomas P Slaughter:

Why we love our Vodka

We eat candy bars, because it’s a tastier sugar delivery system than just eating sugar granules.  Some smoke cigarettes, because it was once seen as a status form of nicotine delivery.  Chewing tobacco just didn’t have same kind of image.

In many respects, we drink vodka for the same reason. It’s a colorless, odorless, and some argue tasteless alcohol delivery system. Think of it as the alcohol equivalent of soy.  It takes on the flavor of what’s added to it.

Given this, why is it so popular and so lucrative? Why has it become America’s spirit.

Journalist Victorino Matus looks deep into the bottle to try and find out how Vodka: How a Colorless, Odorless, Flavorless Spirit Conquered America.

My conversation with Victorino Matus

The information age, long before the internet

A few days ago, The New York Times ran a story about how libraries in New York were helping to provide WiFi in parts of the city.  Obviously the link between libraries and information is long standing. 

But imagine that in the 1930’s, long, long before the world wide wide was even a kernel in the mind of Tim Berners-Lee or others, the idea of interconnected information, of hyperlinks, of understanding the connections between information and ideas and then trying to pull them all together in a patchwork of analog technology.  

That’s what Paul Otlay envisioned, way head of his time.  His story, long forgotten and ignored has now come back to life in the work of my guest Alex Wright in Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age.

My conversation with Alex Wright: 

David Boies & Ted Olson and The Legal Case for Marriage Equality

Already 2014 has been a huge year in the freedom to marry movement. Advocates have won 16 out of 16 federal and state court decisions across the country.  Polls show support at an all time high of 59%.  But, although it may seem that way,  this didn’t happen overnight. 

For over 30 years many have been in the trenches carrying the fight.  People like Evan Wolfson, and Bruce Bawer and Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan provided much of the early intellectual heft of the movement.  And then, when it came time for the legal battles to escalate into the federal courts,  one of the most unlikely partnerships in civil-rights history, David Boies and Ted Olson - two of Americas super lawyers, who squared off against each other in Bush v Gore, teamed up to fight California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, — all the way to the Supreme Court.

A year after their victory the have chronicled it, in Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality

My conversation with Ted Olson and David Boies:

Laurence Tribe on The Roberts Court and the Constitution

The Supreme Court today is more influential than ever. From Citizens United to the rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, privacy and free speech, the current Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has has had profound influence.   Yet it remains a mysterious institution. Like Churchill said of the former Soviet Union, it is often a riddle wrapped in an enigma, inside a mystery.

The motivations of the nine men and women who serve for life are often obscure and the internal influences inside the court, are even less transparent. 

What is clear, is that the Roberts’ Court, now almost 10 years old, is developing a personality of its own, even while its individual members very often defy the stereotypical roles that the 

public often assigns to them. 

Trying to make sense of this monolithic and opaque  institution of men and woman and laws, is Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe in his book Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution.

My conversation with Laurence Tribe:

The shame of juvenile prison in America

The American rate of juvenile incarceration is seven times that of Great Britain, and 18 times that of France. It costs, on average, $88,000 a year to keep a young person locked up — far more than the U.S. spends per child, on education.

To examine that system requires a two fold understanding.  One of the criminal justice system that sends so many young people into these facilities and secondly the nature of the facilities themselves and the public policy decisions that have allowed them to deteriorate to the point where it’s almost certain that young people sent to these facilities will have a dramatically greater chance of adult incarceration.

How bad is the problem, can it be solved with the tools we have, and frankly, in spite of what we say, do we even care enough to do anything about it?

Nell Bernstein has spent years up close and personal in the system.  The story she tells in her new book, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison, should make us all ashamed.

My conversation with Nell Bernstein:

Why how we approach cancer treatment matters.

How often have we witnessed tragic events and then, not too long thereafter, heard jokes about those events.  What this teaches us is not disrespect, but it continually reminds us that humor is often the only way we can grasp and understand tragedy.  That humor and tragedy are, even as Shakespeare understood, two sides of the very same coin.

In the ability to find the absurdity in life’s misfortune,  we are helped to see the world as it is, not through the lens of a “reality distortion field.”   

Writer and artist Matt Freedman has applied this idea to his own life, his own battle with cancer and graphically details it in his book Relatively Indolent but Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal.

My conversation with Matt Freedman: 

Why is anyone listening to Antonin Scalia?

Few phrases get used more today than “creative destruction.”  What it really reflects though, is simply the way in which the world has changed.  Our forefathers, along with the very founders of the country, couldn’t have imaged everyday things like air travel, the interstate highway system, telephones, automobiles or even indoor plumbing.  Much less the internet, the splitting of the atom, or globalization.

So how is it that members of the our third branch of government, the Supreme Court, actually hold contemporary debates about constitutional ideas, in the context of what the founders world was once like?

The answer is Antonin Scalia.  Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia, has had a profound influence, far beyond his decisions and the world of Court conferences.  His ideas about original intent and originalism have taken hold as a real principle of debate.  And that fact alone, may well be his lasting legacy.

As this current court term comes to an end, Law Professor Bruce Allen Murphy tries to understand Scalia in Scalia: A Court of One.

My conversation with Bruce Allen Murphy:

What if you discovered your father was a notorious serial killer?

For centuries theologians have argued about how the sins of the father might fall upon their children.  Freud talked about the need for a father's protection of his children. And Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff showed us how a deceptive father can impact his sons.

As children have to cope today, with so many fathers in prison, for crimes all the way up to murder, it’s almost a public policy concern how this plays out.

But what if a child didn’t know, at least not until his 40’s, that his father was an infamous serial killer who had never been caught or brought to justice?

That’s what Gary Stewart discovered about his father. Stewart came to believe his father was the infamous Zodiac Killer, who stalked Northern California in the late 60’s.

That’s the story that Gary Stewart now shares with the public, in his book The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father . . . and Finding the Zodiac Killer.

My conversation with Gary Stewart:

Ceasar Chavez and the nobility of poverty

One of the overwhelming ideas of the 20th Century has been the struggle of people throughout the world, to achieve a middle class life. The Horatio Alger mythology of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps has informed most of the American experience, but not necessarily for Cesar Chavez.

When we think of Chavez, we think of farm workers, the fields of Delano, or the organization of the UFW.  The grape boycott of the late 60’s, the secondary boycott, which would give the farm workers their greatest success and  the Chicano movement of which he would become a part. In fact, Chaves’ life and his legacy was far more complex.

More than a union organizer, he saw himself as a community organizer. Perhaps a community organizer on steroids.  He sought not just to lift up people, but to solve there problems.  Where many wanted to move farm workers to the middle class, Chavez saw a kind of nobility in poverty which actually may have limited his success.

Miriam Pawel has written the first full throated biography about The Crusades of Cesar Chavez:

My conversation with Miriam Pawel:

Why is Green Building Exploding?

When we think about building today, almost anywhere on the planet, be it a house or a gleaming glass, steel and concrete office building, we almost reflexively think about how the building was build and how green is that building?

Market forces have made green building a premium to be desired and paid for.  But this didn’t happen by magic.  It happened primarily because one man saw the need to make this his life's work. He is David Gottfried.

David Gottfried is the founder of the World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the CEO of Regenerative Ventures. His latest work is Explosion Green: One Man's Journey To Green The World's Largest Industry.

My conversation with David Gottfried

THE American Spirit

Few products are more American than Bourbon.  In fact some argue that the Kentucky spirit IS the American experience, distilled and sealed in a bottle.

While the English have their Scotch, the Irish their Whisky, Latin America their rum, and Mexico it's cervezas, Kentucky Bourbon is our defining spirit.  So what does this drink say about our character as a nation and how does that history apply to today's America?

Dane Huckelbridge sought to find out and he shares it with us in Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit.

My conversation with Dane Huckelbridge:

Is Hemp the coming disruptive Agricultural Revolution?

Imagine one of the strongest fibers on the planet, a potential energy sources, and something used by our founders, that is now illegal. That is the story of hemp. Sometime comic/journalist Doug Fine tells me how we all may be  Hemp Bound: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Next Agricultural Revolution.

My conversation with Doug Fine:

Junipero Serra's mission and the Founding of California

If you are a Californian and especially if you went to school in California, its history and the remarkable life of Junipero Serra were an important part of that education. 

In the mid 1700’s Junipero Serra would leave Spain for the New World.  The Catholic Church, Christianity and California would never be the same. Now in Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California, Gregory Orfalea gives us a fascinating narrative of the remarkable life of Junípero Serra.

My conversation with Gregory Orfalea:

Films Not to be MIssed

Think about the movies we remember.  They are a little like old songs, or great books, or great meals.  They are purveyors of a kind of double imagery, instantly making yesterdays events todays reality.  

But with movies there is something more, in the way they stay with us.  The way the images play around in our heads and the memories, words and images become embodied in who we are.  

If you grew up watching and loving  movies, like esteemed film critic Kenneth Turan, they take on an even more powerful meaning.

Now Turan has taken a look in the rear view mirror at a a lifetime of film and chosen his fifty-four favorites,  detailed in his new book  Not to be Missed: Fifty-four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film.

My conversation with Kenneth Turan:

Are the Koch Brothers really as bad as they seem?

If I said we were going to talk about a story that involved grand homes, yachts, priceless painting, messy romances, private investigators and armored limousines, you probably wouldn’t  think it was the story of a family and a group of men who have been painted as the greatest political villains of the 21st Century.

In fact it is.  It is the story of the Koch brothers.  Fred and Bill and David and Charles and their father Fred, who was one of the founders of the John Birch Society.

The question is not just how this political and economic dynasty has become so powerful, its how they have created such fear in their opponents, out of all proportion to their relatively limited political success.

Also the membrane between the Koch’s libertarian ideas and the GOP’s and Tea Party's social agenda may be a sometime marriage of convenience, but one that may not be destined for the long haul. Like so many businessmen who think politics will bend to their will and money, they are often surprised.

The first full scale look at the elusive Koch family is Daniel Schulman's  Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

My conversation with Daniel Schulman:  (We apologize for some static in the first five minutes) 

Console Wars

Long before Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were battling it out on retail shelves, a small but nimble competitor very nearly unseated Nintendo as the top game maker of the 90’s.

This history of that battle for video game market supremacy between Sega’s Genesis gaming system and Nintendo’s SNES console is the background of a new book by Blake Harris, Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation.  It is also a history of how gaming become the huge business that it is today.

My conversation with Blake Harris:

D Day and The Mantle of Command

We mark the the 70th anniversary of D Day.  Not only one of the most significant events of the 20th Century, but one of the most significant decisions ever made by a President to send men into harms way. 

In a world in which decision making has become an expertise on to itself, when Presidential leadership is reexamined almost every day, it serves us well from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, to understand what really went into making that fateful decision, 70 years ago.  How it changed the war, how it changed our history and what it might teach us about navigating a dangerous world today.

Nigel Hamilton examines all of this as he looks at FDR in The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942.

My conversation with Nigel Hamilton: