Talk Cocktail

Someone once referred to advice, as sanctioned nagging.  It’s cute, but the fact is that we get advice all the time. Some of it is valuable, much of it useless.   But do we miss the value of the good advice by our defensiveness, by our pre programmed fight or flight response and simply our reflexive shutting down in the face of criticism?

Performance reviews, student conferences, even the old standby the report card, are all part of our feedback loop.  It’s all around us.

Those giving the feedback are often told that  it’s a skill, that there is an art and science to giving good advice.  But is the opposite true?   Is there also an art and skill in getting feedback?  Can we all make the process a whole lot more worthwhile by understanding how to maximize being on the receiving end? Doug Stone and Sheila Heen think so and they make their case in Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well.

My conversation with Doug Stone & Sheila Heen:

In this age of startups, creative destruction, public companies and activist investors, it's hard to imagine the idea of creating a huge industrial empire, run by successive generations of family

Few empires exemplify this better than the history of Anheuser-Busch.  From its Germanic roots in St. Louis, it’s a story of all that is American culture, good and bad.  Ambition, philandering divorce, substance abuse, violence, family feuds, all washed down with a beer.

It’s a saga of an American family and an American beer, told by longtime LA Times reporter William Knoedelseder in Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer.

My conversation with William Knoedelseder:

Winston Churchill one refereed to the former Soviet Union as an enigma, wrapped in "a riddle, surrounded by mystery." Much the same might be said about the Vatican.  A large bureaucracy, competing political interests, the potential and reality of scandal and cover up.

John Thavis, has spent almost 30 years covering the Vatican. He walked the hallowed halls, was one of the "boys on the bus" on the papal plane and understands both the human and spiritual side of this seemingly monolithic and often flawed institution.

Now free of daily reporting, he allows himself to look back in The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church.

My conversation with John Thavis: 

As a 26 year old reporter covering the Nixon campaign in l968, Joe McGinniss would go on to write one of the seminal works of political reporting.  The Selling of the President 1968 would portray the next level of media in politics.  If the televised Nixon/Kennedy debate set the stage, the 1968 Nixon campaign and the work of a young Roger Ailes, as reported by McGinniss', would be main event.

McGinness would go on to write about many other controversial characters, both in the annals of politics and true crime.  His reporting on Jeffery McDonald and his battles with Janet Malcolm would put him at the center of a media and literary storm.  His last political work, a look deep inside the shallowness of Sarah Palin, would be fitting capstone for his political reporting.

Over the years, I spoke to McGinniss several times.  Here are the two most recent.  His look at Palin and his story Never Enough that captured the dark heart of modern family greed and averse.

Never Enough

11/2/2007

The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

10/10/2011

Just like in The Wizard of Oz, sometimes it seems that events, coincides and serendipitous good fortune happen as part of a grand plan.  Later we think that it’s the the result of a great and powerful force pulling the ropes and levers.  Only much later do we discover that events happen on their own, and it’s only in a dream, driven by our penchant to find order and connection, that the events are tied together.

For many of us this happens all the time.  Thinking about an old friend who suddenly shows up or gets in touch, or a near miss of an accident that feels like an invisible hand saved us, or  finding something from the distant past at precisely the moment we need it.  

All of these are examples of the The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. And now, thanks to David J. Hand, we have a new and much clearer understanding of why it works.

My conversation with David Hand:

Some people have jobs that are often very disconnected from everyday life. But Daniel Jones’ job is a form of daily life incarnate.  As the long time editor of the Modern Love column in The Sunday New York Times Magazine, since 2004 Jones is perhaps the reigning expert on love, relationships and why we all “need the eggs.”

If hundreds of years from now, an alien civilizations wanted to find out about the mating habits of humans, they could do no better than to look at Jones new book Love Illuminated: Exploring Life's Most Mystifying Subject (with the Help of 50,000 Strangers).

My conversation with Daniel Jones:

I think we can all stipulate that we continue to witness growing income inequality in America.  Class mobility is at an all time low and if we don’t begin to address the problem, the consequences for American democracy will be severe.

But even if we embrace the problem, how to we begin to solve it?  Programs, including taxes to create any kind of redistributive fairness, are a non starter in Washington and in Statehouses everywhere.  So where do we begin?

UC Irvine Professor Greg Duncan and Harvard economist Richard Murnane argue in their book Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education,

that the answer actually may be right in our schools.  That only education can level the economic playing field.

My conversation with Greg Duncan & Richard Murnane:

Most of you know that the mad prophet the airwaves was Howard Beale. The very idea that we can listen to a clip from Network, made 38 years ago, and its sounds as relevant as if it were written yesterday, speaks to the genius of Paddy Chayefsky's script, and the serendipity of the movie and its production.

The movie was at once spot on in its portrayal of its moment in time and prescient about something as big and hard to hold on to as the television and the media landscape.  It is truly a movie for the ages.

Not to put down other efforts, but look at Network in the context of the simplicity and gloss of contemporary movies, and you begin to understand why we are still talking about Network today.

We’re also talking about it because Dave Itzkoff, culture reporter at the New York Times, has written the definitive behind the scenes story of this iconic film, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies.

My conversation with Dave Itzkoff

When we think about the cutting edge of technology, our thoughts usually turn to Silicon Valley, or to other tech centers around the world. When we think about technology and government, we tend to think about failure. The inability of the government to make a simple website work, or the fact that it was a big deal for the current President to get a Blackberry when he came to office, or that most government agencies, including the IRS, don’t function with email. In a funny kind of way, it should make us feel better about the NSA story. Knowing that when it comes to technology, the government is usually the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

However, what if all that changed? If the best and the brightest of technology came to Washington with the intent of controlling or subverting technology? With the resources and power that they have, they could do some real damage.

And so begins the world that Daniel Suarez portrays in his new techno thriller Influx.

My conversation with Daniel Suarez:

The recent debate and court challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reminds us of what was the once and future fragility of registering black voters in the south. Back in 1966, a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith, who became the first African American student at University of Mississippi, set out on an almost solitary march from Memphis to Jackson Mississippi to register black voters.

At the end of that march, which started on June 5 1966, the civil rights movement would be forever transformed.  The movement's twin goals of the dream of integration and of nonviolence, would be replaced by black power and impatience.

It's a story that's not as famous as the Selma to Montgomery march a year earlier, but its impact was everlasting and its tensions still relevant today. This is the story that Aram Goudsouzian tells in Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

My conversation with Aram Goudsouzian:

Years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an ad campaign referring to itself as the “Daily Diary of the American Dream.”  Today, we might say that the barrage of statistical information we get about the economy is that kind of diary.  Just this morning, we probably all heard the latest GDP numbers.  

But what does it mean and what problem is it solving?  Sometimes it seems there is a kind of “uncertainty principle” at work. In that the process of trying to measure every aspect of the economy and even our politics, actually changes those numbers because it changes the way we see the world.  And since perception is often reality, the daily recitation of these numbers from Washington and Wall Street actually creates its own unreal reality.

Zachary Karabell in his new book  The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World gives us a random walk though these numbers that often rule our lives, but mean very little.

My conversation with Zachery Karabell:

Amid the violence and upheaval in the Ukraine and the Russian response, a debate has broken out in Washington about the relevance of Cold War strategy. Whether it still should be relevant to viewing Russian actions and geopolitics?

It would be interesting to know what George Kennan might think about it.  He was after all, the architect of America's cold war policy of containment and perhaps our greatest political and diplomatic strategist with respect to the Russia and the former Soviet Empire.  

He was both a man of letters and a man of action. But his views, on domestic politics, and on modernity were far less prescient and far out of step with the changes taking place in America.  In short, he was a complex man, the likes of which we seldom see in public life today.

He also kept a diary for almost 90 of this 101 years.  University of Connecticut  historian Frank Costigliola has edited those diaries into The Kennan Diaries.

My conversation with Frank Costigliola:

As sports stories go, the legendary rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers, is one of the best and most enduring. Yet it’s a rivalry that has had it’s had its dark and ugly moments.  One of the those moments came a couple of years ago as Giants fan Bryan Stow was attacked and beaten in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. A sad incident that perhaps reflects the mean spiritedness of our times.

Another ugly incident happened back in 1965. It had a better outcome.  One where the rivals, Juan Marichal of the SF Giants and John Roseboro of the Dodgers, would turn to  violence. A violence that reflected the tensions of the time.  Yet it would also turn to forgiveness and redemption.

That’s the story that John Rosengren tell in The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball's Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption

My conversation with John Rosengren:

We know that there are powerful demographic trends taking place in the US.  That the economic divide in America is widening at an almost geometric pace.  That certain groups repeatedly, in spite of powerful evidence to the contrary, vote against their own economic self interest.  

We’ve seen and continue to see examples of the ways in which Big Data and the vast amount of individual information available today, make it easier to define the electors.  

Back in 1964, journalist Eugene Burdick first took up this issue  in a seminal novel entitled The 480.  A story where computers could slice and dice the electorate to give one candidate an electoral advantage.  Today, that’s no longer fiction

Tony Fairfax. a demographic consultant and CEO of CensusChannel LLC,  has been looking at these trends for decades and he’s come to some interesting new conclusions in The Presidential Trend.

My conversation with Tony Fairfax: 

For those that didn’t live through the 50’s and early 60’s, Mad Men has given us a clearer idea of so many of the changes that were impacting the nation and the culture.

The post war period freed up Americans.  We were no longer bound by the needs of the war and the depression that preceded it.  Television, labor saving appliances, medical breakthroughs and a new sense of tolerance would begin to change America.

George Marsden, in his new work The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, argues that the 1950’s marked the end of an era.  That we became a much more pluralistic culture and that the ways in which the political and social leaders of the time approached these changes, has

given rise to many of the problems and divisions we face today.

My conversation with George Marsden: 

Jane Jacobs, writing about the life and death of cities, reminds us that people living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. So how and why, she wonders, can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture, so that it becomes virtually lost.

The city of Detroit was such a culture. Once the heartland of industrial America, now it sits as an urban corpse.  What does it say about America, about Detroit, but more importantly about the people that built it and watched it crumble?

Few understand Detroit better than reporter Charlie LeDuff, whose Detroit: An American Autopsy, is a cautionary tale for cities everywhere.

My conversation with Charlie LeDuff

When we hear talk of the reinvention of our lives, I think re reflexively think this is something we do in our 30’s or 40’s or even 50’s.  Today though, men and woman are both reinventing themselves into their 60’s and beyond.  Sometime it’s to pursue new dimensions of ourselves as we get older and wiser, sometimes, it’s because of death or divorce, and sometimes, as we live longer, its because we face new financial imperatives.  That’s the journey for Rebecca Winter in Anna Quindlen's’ new novel Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

Anna Quindlen, in addition to writing seven novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize, being a successful journalist and being only the third woman to write  a regular column for the New York Times, has been for the past 30 years a cartographer of our daily life experience, always providing a kind of decatur projection of our contemporary existence.

My conversation with Anna Quindlen:

Twenty two years ago a relatively unknown Governor of Arkansas was on the ropes in his presidential campaign.  He had been accused of marital infidelity and with his wife by his side, went  on 60 Minutes to plead his case to the American people.  

His wife, was even less known to the American people, so her comments in that interview with Steve Kroft, had particular resonance.

Today, that woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has served eight years as First Lady, as a United States Senator from New York, in the seat once held by Bobby Kennedy and for four years as Secretary of State.  She came just a few cracks in the glass ceiling short of the Democratic presidential nomination.

It’s a remarkable story, by any political standard. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes tell the story of Hillary from the 2008 campaign forward, in their new book HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton.

My conversation with Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:

Few questions occupy us more today than what do we need to know and when do we do we need to know it, with respect to what our government is doing.  How much should we know, particularly in times of war and what might really jeopardize national security?

These questions haunt us today, but they are nothing new.  In the closing days of WWII America recruited scores of German scientists that became the bulwark of our space effort.  These scientists had shady pasts and were far more connected to the Third Reich than we were ever told.

If we knew, might the nation have objected, and if so, might the Soviets have beaten us in the space race and to the moon?  And what broader implications might that have had for the cold war and for global geopolitics?

Annie Jacobsen is a journalist and author, and uncoverer of secrets. She’s the author the NYT bestseller Area 51 and now she turns her attention to the story Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America.

My conversation with Annie Jacobsen: 

Years from now, we will look back on the way we treat cancer today, with poisons and chemo and radiation, and we’ll look at it exactly the same way we view leaching and snake oil.   Today, many look for alternative cutting edge cures, they may be the precursors of future medicine.

Back in the 19th century as patients looked to avoid leaching and bleeding and things like induced vomiting, their search gave way to a host of alternative practices that have become some of our most fundamental practices of health and medicine today. Erika Janik takes us through the history in Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine.

My conversation with Erika Janik:

When we deconstruct the essential elements of our culture today,  celebrity culture, the privilege of wealth, the importance of popular culture in shaping the broad national conversation, even our obsession with the automobile, we find it all had its roots in the 1920’s.  

Perhaps the endurance of Gatsby, is that it represents a time that was a kind of line of demarcation for the country.  One world before the early 1920's and another after.

This is the world that Sarah Churchwell takes us into in her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. A story about a story,  it captures the ethos of the 20’s, the origin of the times and the great American novel that still defines it.

My conversation with Sarah Churchwell:

How many of us have taken great leaps out of fear?  How often has a failure, or being fired, or jilted resulted in being forced to take actions that turned out to be positively life changing? Often in our personal journey, when we get lost in the wilderness, that is what finally brings us home.

As Bill Gates, unquestionably one of our most successful entrepreneurs has said, “it’s fine to celebrate success, but more important are the lessons of failure.” 

In the startup world, entrepreneurs are taught to fail quickly, learn and move on.  We all get advice, but it’s life experience and usually failure that teaches us the bigger lessons.

Journalist Megan McArdle explains in The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

My conversation with Megan McArdle:

We are often quick to use the term “cultural phenomenon.”  Through the back lens of history though,  few things truly are. Yet fifty years ago we experienced something that lives up to that idea.  By now we’ve all been regaled by memories of the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show fifty year ago last week.

But with that as the backdrop, what is the larger cultural significance? Perhaps it's fair to say that the Beatles transformed music, pop culture, fashion, and movies.  They  also created something we rarely see today.  A cultural experience that brought the entire nation together in one shared set of emotions.

Penelope Rowlands was there, literally on the barricades.  Now in The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians & Other Fans Remember, she’s culled some of the most interesting retrospective thoughts of today, trying to examine Beatlemania then, and even what it might mean for us 2014.

My conversation with Penelope Rowlands:

Great powers ebb and flow.  A random walk through history shows the Turks, the Germans, the British, the Japanese, the Spanish have all, at one time, shaped geopolitics.  For most of the past century, America has stood atop the world.  Now China, after three amazing decades of internal growth, is looking to secure its place in the world.  

But is geopolitics a zero sum game?  Does American influence have to wane in order for China to expand?  Can China effectively shape and use its economic growth to expand its sphere of influence in Asia and Africa and as it does, how should the US respond?

Geoff Dyer, a veteran journalist who’s covered China for years for the Financial Times, examines all of this in The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China--and How America Can Win.

My conversation with Geoff Dyer:

When FDR became president in 1933 he called for “bold, persistent experimentation.” He believed that it was essential to do something!  This was a far cry from Warren Harding, who  said in 1920, “that any experimentation will add to the confusion.  Our best hope lies in the administration of our proven system.”

Upon assuming the office of President in 1923 Calvin Coolidge world take these works very seriously.  He would actually and literally carry out the policies that Harding and Coolidge were elected on.  A policy of NO and of austerity.  It was a far cry from the politics of action what characterizes our modern presidency. 

What it wrought for the nation is still being debated today.  Amity Shlaes gives us a new take on all of it, in her new biography of Coolidge

My conversation with Amity Shlaes:

America has long gotten itself involved in civil wars around the world.  In Korea, Vietnam, Spain, on the African continent and more recently in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria.  It should not be surprising then to realize that other nations were engaged in the outcome of America's Civil War and that it provided Lincoln ample opportunity to engage in foreign affairs.

We think of Lincoln as our domestic president. Lincoln saving the union so that this nation would not perish.  But he also straddled the world during what might be called America's first age of globalization.

Kevin Peraino, a veteran Newsweek journalist looks at this side of Lincoln in Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power.

My conversation with Kevin Peraino:  

We look to technology as the panacea to solve so many of today's problems. Yet we fear technology. When it goes wrong, like stealing our credit card information, or not allowing easy access to a government website, we get angry. Clearly, our emotional nexus with technology is out of balance with our intellectual understanding of it. The price we pay is fear, alienation, confusion and a degree of appropriate paranoia.

Few understand this better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook.  He has used this imbalance to scare the bejesus out of us in his books like Coma, Cure, and Fever.  Now in his latest work, Cell, he once again walks us through the cost benefit analysis of medical technology falling into the wrong hands.

My conversation with Robin Cook:

Even in the world of physics, celebrity culture often rules.  We’ve all heard about the search for the so called God particle, the Higgs Boson and the large Hadron Collider.

Yet those in the know, in the astrophysics community, have had their eyes focused on another subatomic particle, the Neutrino. These may really possess the secrets to the inner workings of the planet and the universe. 

Ray Jayawardhana is one of our leading astrophysicist and in Neutrino Hunters: he looks into this ghostly particle to unlock the secrets of the universe.

My conversation with Ray Jayawardhana: 

In just  days the Winter Olympics begin in Russia.  In some respects the world comes to a nation that may be even more repressive than the Moscow of the 1980 Summer Olympics.

While President Putin has released some political prisoners, including two members of the group Pussy Riot, the release itself was a kind of de facto acknowledgement of the corruption and repressiveness of its political and justice system.

Masha Gessen has been  a long time activist journalist in Russia and recently moved to the US in light of Russia’s ongoing crackdown on the LGBT community. In Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, she gives us an up close view of what’s really going on inside Russia.

My conversation with Masha Gessen: 

From the founding of the republic and the debates over slavery, until the passage of the Civil Right act in l964, took nearly 200 years.  With respect to the civil right issues of our time, from the Stonewall Riots in 1969, to the President of the United States supporting same sex marriages, took 43 tumultuous years. 

During that time, three generations would engage in the struggle.  A plague would descend upon and become part of the struggle and take the lives of many in the movement.  Public opinion would go from shock and horror to love and acceptance.  As the saying goes, oh what a strange trip it was. 

Sean Strub has been a kind of Zelig of gay rights movement.  He was there at all the key moments, with all the key players.  He was on the ramparts, in the living rooms and hospital rooms and courtrooms along the way.  He now gives us a memoir of his life and of the times we’ve all shared, in his new book Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival.

My conversation with Sean Strub:

John Lennon who wrote that “life is what happens while we're busy making other plans.”  Or as the old Yiddish proverb goes, “man plans and god laughs.” 

Artis Henderson experienced this in the most complex, profound  and sorrowful way.  After altering her own life plan, by surprisingly falling in love with a young soldier, her life would be shattered as his life would be taken in a helicopter crash in Iraq, shortly after they were married.  

She would become what in military parlance is an Unremarried Widow.

My conversation with Artis Henderson:

What are the forces that cause us to continue eating when we know we should stop?  Why has the quality of food that most Americans eat, deteriorated even while more and more healthy choices are available? Why are our children experiencing an epidemic of obesity, and what role does the food industry play in this?

And why, when controlling healthcare costs is supposedly  job one, we allow the epidemic of obesity in America to account for no less than 10% of all of our health care costs?

Is the fault in our food our in ourselves? Dr. Robert Lustig, whose work has focused on the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, shows what's really going on with the food choices we make, in Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.

My conversation with Dr. Robert Lustig: 

While the United States has, since it founding, prided itself on the idea of justice for all, those principles have seldom found expression in the international realm, until relatively recently.

Former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who would prosecute crimes at Nuremberg, would lay out the case for equal international justice, when he said in his opening statement “that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.  To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

Given this, the idea that the US would ever participate in any kind of international tribunal has always seemed remote.  Yet ten years ago, the International Criminal Court would come to be. And for all its struggles and limitations, it has started to gain its footing. American University Professor David Bosco, takes us through the history in Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics

My conversation with David Bosco: 

We pretty well understand how evolution impacts living organisms. But is it possible that there is a similar kind of survival of the fittest at play with respect to culture, ideas or even to language?

If so, with no DNA trail, how do we determine its history and what relevance does it have to creating a contemporaneous understanding of our culture and language?

The answer actually lies in our use of what’s come to be called Big Data. Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, have detailed this in Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture.

My conversation with Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel: 

From  the highest levels of international and governmental affairs, to the most personal and intimate relationships, secrets and lies are often at the heart of so many narratives.  

We embrace privacy, yet we want truth.  As individuals and as a society we spend enormous resources covering up unpleasant truths, only to find, as we seem to never learn, that the cover up is always tougher than the lie.  

Is there something in human nature or human psychology itself that makes transparency so difficult?  Yet sometimes judging  from Facebook, we have a whole younger generation that shares everything.  How do we square this circle and begin to understand the real power of secrets and lies?

That's what author and long time publishing executive Jane Isay set out to discover in Secrets and Lies: Surviving the Truths That Change Our Lives.

My conversation with Jane Isay: 

We have all had the experience of hearing a familiar and likable piece of music from a long time ago. Suddenly the music short circuits time and makes yesterdays events, today’s reality.  It’s as if that song triggers primal changes within us, that allows us to transcend both space and time.

Now imagine if that was more than just our fond memories playing tricks on us. Image that the music had actually become part of us, of our DNA.  This notion is a small part of the brilliant blending of science, art, and literature, that is Richard Powers' new novel Orfeo.

My conversation with Richard Powers:

Everyday most of us battle our own demons.  These Demons often prevent us from doing perhaps the hardest thing there is, that is initiating and adapting to personal change.

With the New Year, I’m sure we’ve all made resolutions.  By now most are long forgotten.   Change is hard. Personal change is even harder.  One wonders how anyone ever does it.  

Perhaps we can do it by a kind of personal mental jujitsu that manipulates the force of our resistance to change, against itself.  This might work a lot better than confronting it with sheer force of will.  And what if we did this in small incremental steps?  It just might be that in that situation, resistance will give way to success.

It is in these “Microresolutions” that Caroline Arnold has found the sweet spot of change.  She details it in Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently.

My conversation with Caroline L. Arnold:

SLR cameras, pagers, paper maps, travel agents, home telephones, answering machines, transistor radios;  all quaint reminders of days gone by. Today whole new industries are taking over from the old.  The way we find places to stay when we travel, transportation, even the nature of money itself, is changing.

Back in the 90’s we heard about the “Innovators Dilemma.”  About how cheap products would flood the market, before other manufactures could create products with higher value. Perhaps Sony and other Japanese companies were the penultimate example.

Today, new products enter the marketplace full blown. They are cheaper and more efficient and receive instant acceptance.  How do traditional incumbents defend against this?  They don’t. They either innovate on today’s terms, or they go the way of Blockbuster, or Blackberry or Kodak, or Garmin.

These are just some of the ideas put forth by Larry Downes in his new book, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation.

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My conversation with Larry Downes:

Someone once wrote that happiness is serious business. But should happiness be a goal in and of itself, or is it simply a construct for achieving what we really desire, and helping us in finding our place in the world? Woody Allen in Annie Hall saw the world divided only into the “horrible,” and the “miserable.”  What kind of a construct is that?

Gretchen Rubin has looked at happiness from all sides now.  She is the author of the NY Times bestseller THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, she is a former law clerk on the Supreme Court and now the author of Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life.

My conversation with Gretchen Rubin:

The reporting of and understanding of sports always seems to be a balancing act between the importance of teams vs. the primacy of an individual player.

Certainly in basketball, the decision was made a long time ago, that individuals stars  would drive the NBA.  Certainly many have over the years.  But as much as any one player, one coach has stood atop the sport.  With eleven championships, Phil Jackson is the master.

But what got him there?  Was it luck, timing, sheer basketball smarts, or a unique ability, almost like a film director in his prime, to manage huge egos and diverse personalities and consistently get the best out of them?

Long time sports journalist Peter Richmond, tries in  Phil Jackson: Lord of the Rings,

to pin down who Phil Jackson is and what has made him so successful.

My conversation with Peter Richmond: